On 10/23/2011 04:07 PM, Robert Kern wrote:
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 20:58, Matthew Brett<matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Matthew Brett<matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Nathaniel Smith<njs@pobox.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I was surprised today to notice that Mark's NA mask support appears to have been merged into numpy master and is described in the draft release notes[1]. My surprise is because merging it to mainline without any discussion on the list seems to contradict what what Travis wrote in July, that it was being developed as an experiment and explicitly *not* intended to be merged without further discussion:
"Basically, because there is not consensus and in fact a strong and reasonable opposition to specific points, Mark's NEP as proposed cannot be accepted in its entirety right now. However, I believe an implementation of his NEP is useful and will be instructive in resolving the issues and so I have instructed him to spend Enthought time on the implementation. Any changes that need to be made to the API before it is accepted into a released form of NumPy can still be made even after most of the implementation is completed as far as I understand it."[2]
Can anyone explain what the plan is here? Is the idea to continue the discussion and rework the API while it is in master, delaying the next release for as long as it takes to achieve consensus? Or is there some mysterious git thing going on where "master" is actually an experimental branch and the real mainline development is happening somewhere else? Or something else I'm not thinking of? Please help me understand.
I don't know about you, but watching the development from a distance it became increasingly clear to me that this would happen. I"m sure you've had the experience as I have, of mixing several desirable changes into the same set of commits, and it's hard work to avoid this. I imagine this is what happened with Mark's MA changes.
The result is actually an extension of the problems of the original discussion, which is a feeling that we the community do not have a say in the development.
I think this email might be a plea to the numpy steering group, and to Travis in particular, to see if we can use a discussion of this series of events to decide on a good way to proceed in future.
Oh come, people had plenty to say, you and Nathaniel in particular. Mark pointed to the pull request, anyone who was interested could comment on it, Benjamin Root did so, for instance. The fact things didn't go the way you wanted doesn't indicate insufficient discussion. And you are certainly welcome to put together an alternative and put up a pull request.
I was also guessing that something like this would be the reply to Nathaniel's post.
But it wasn't. It was a reply to your message.
I think this reply is rude because it implies some sort of sour-grapes from Nathaniel, when he is politely referring back to an explicit reassurance from Travis.
What Travis assured did happen, just on the pull request (on which everyone's input was requested and where most "should this be merged?" discussions are *meant* to happen) rather than on the mailing list.
Except that for a project with a large user community (like numpy), you will _not_ get the feedback you are looking for on github pull-request pages. That's because most users do not look at detailed developer related things like pull requests. But they do read the mailing list. I don't use these features so I don't have a dog in this fight. But potentially controversial changes really should be discussed on the mailing list rather than on pull requests (and yes, I know that there was a lot of discussion about this stuff some months ago). Scott -- Scott M. Ransom Address: NRAO Phone: (434) 296-0320 520 Edgemont Rd. email: sransom@nrao.edu Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA GPG Fingerprint: 06A9 9553 78BE 16DB 407B FFCA 9BFA B6FF FFD3 2989