On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 7:25 AM, Marten van Kerkwijk <m.h.vankerkwijk@gmail.com> wrote: [...]
p.s. Independently of rules, I don't see how Travis would not qualify even from current work, given that he has just committed to actively try to improve/generalize dtype.
Just to clarify what's happening here (at least as I understand it -- hopefully Travis / Continuum folks will be in communication with the community at some point), it sounds like the plan is not so much that Travis will be working on the dtype stuff (he has no time) as that he's hiring other people to work on it: "Travis (Continuum) is working with 3 part-time people (currently Kerry Oliphant, Christian Tismer and Yarko Tymciurak) with additional advisement from Irwin Zaid, Jeff Reback, and Antoine Pitrou. The target of this effort is two Python packages (currently called memtype and gufunc) which could serve as prototypes and/or scaffolding and/or implementations of the same ideas that get into NumPy. They will be working and communicating with the NumPy community. Travis's brother, Kerry Oliphant, is leading the group and tasked with communicating with the broader community about the activities of this team." -- https://bids.hackpad.com/Python-Stack-Refactoring-uU9RVWkMc0J So this seems orthogonal to the steering council discussion -- decisions about steering council membership are 100% about actual work done by actual individuals, without any regard to who is writing checks to whom. (This is a key part of the whole maintaining-independence, keeping-corporate-influence-at-arms-length aspect of the governance plan.) (It also sounds like Continuum's current plan is that instead of improving numpy directly, they will be off building a toy array library to explore the idea of implementing this stuff directly in the core interpreter as builtin types. And in parallel, those of us who are interested in this stuff in numpy will be getting to work on actually implementing new dtype stuff in numpy. And I guess at some point we'll compare notes and see how close our two implementations ended up being in retrospect? Right now I don't understand any path for their work to be useful to numpy, and it sounds like for now the numpy team should just proceed with our existing refactoring plans on the assumption that nothing will come of the Continuum work, and if that's wrong then it will be a pleasant surprise. But Travis is aware of my thoughts here and keen to do it this way anyway, and it's their money and time, so, up to them really...) -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org