Hi Julian, While the numpy 1.10 situation was bad, I do want to clarify that the problems we had in astropy were a consequence of *good* changes in `recarray`, which solved many problems, but also broke the work-arounds that had been created in `astropy.io.fits` quite a long time ago (possibly before astropy became as good as it tries to be now at moving issues upstream and perhaps before numpy had become as responsive to what happens downstream as it is now; I think it is fair to say many project's attitude to testing has changed rather drastically in the last decade!). I do agree, though, that it just goes to show one has to try to be careful, and like Nathaniel's suggestion of automatic testing with pre-releases -- I just asked on our astropy-dev list whether we can implement it. All the best, Marten