Hi all, Travis, Mark, and I talked on Skype this week about how to productively move forward with the NA debate, and I got picked to summarize for the list :-). There are three main things we discussed: 1) About process: We seem to agree that this discussion has been ineffective for a variety of reasons, and that it would be best to back up and try the consensus-based approach. Maybe not everyone agrees... I'm not sure how we go about building consensus on whether we need consensus? And we noted that we may not actually all mean the same thing by that. To start a discussion, I'll write up separately what I understand by that term. 2) If we require consensus on our NA implemention, then we have a problem for the 1.7.0 release. The problem is this: -- We have some kind of commitment to keeping compatibility between releases -- Therefore, if we release with NA masks, then we have some kind of commitment to continuing to support these in some form going forward -- But as per above, we can't make such a commitment until we have consensus, and we don't have consensus. Even if we end up deciding that the current code is the best thing ever, we haven't done that yet. Therefore, we have a kind of constrained optimization problem: we need to find the best way to adjust our "some kind of commitment", or the current code, or both, so that we can release 1.7. Alternatively we could delay the release until we have reached and implemented consensus, but I have an allergy to putting such amorphous things on our critical path, and I suspect I'm not the only one. (If it turns out that consensus is quick and the release is slow for other reasons, then that'd be great, of course, but why depend on it if we don't have to?) I'll also send a separate email to try and lay out the main options here, as a basis for discussion. 3) And, in the long run, there's the actual question of what we kind of NA support we actually want in numpy. A major problem here is that it's very difficult for anyone who hasn't spent huge amounts of time wading through the mailing list to actually understand what the points of contention are. So, Mark and I are going to *co*-write a document explaining what we see as the main problems, and trying to clarify our disagreements. Of course, this still won't include everyone's point of view, but hopefully it will serve as a good starting point for... you guessed it... discussion. Cheers, -- Nathaniel