On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi all,

It's been a little over 6 months since the release of 1.6.0 and the NA debate has quieted down, so I'd like to ask your opinion on the timing of 1.7.0. It looks to me like we have a healthy amount of bug fixes and small improvements, plus three larger chucks of work:

- datetime
- NA
- Bento support

My impression is that both datetime and NA are releasable, but should be labeled "tech preview" or something similar, because they may still see significant changes. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

There's still some maintenance work to do and pull requests to merge, but a beta release by Christmas should be feasible. What do you all think?


Sounds reasonable. I'd also like to add some features to the polynomial modules.
  1. Improved zero finding with Gaussian quadrature. With the improved zeros and using an expression for Gaussian weights things work well up to degree 100.
  2. Small change to the evaluation functions adding a "tensor" keyword and allowing arrays of coefficients. This change allows easy evaluation of tensor products of the polynomials, either on a grid or on a set of points, which is handy for working in two or three dimensions.

I think the recent fixes for user types should also go in, but I'd like Mark to review them first. The R like sampling function could also go in, I just had a question about the name 'choice', but if that is an R compatible name I'm OK with it. In fact, I think many of the current pull requests could go in with the addition of a few tests in some cases. I'll fix the ma.polyfit function test sometime this week. Maybe we should have a weekend devoted to getting the current request in.

Chuck