Anyone? Anyone?
From the lack of response to my email two weeks ago, I guess that there isn't really a good way to distribute a library function for testing. When ctypes functionality was initially included, the test function used was part of the standard library, to avoid this same problem. I propose that we therefore do one of two things.
One, we incorporate the changes as a user-beware feature, and strongly suggest that users who are willing to do the work necessary to use the functionality (a minority, presumably) do their own testing. In order to use the speed improvements here, a user has to code their function in C, compile it to a library, and load that library using ctypes. Then, that ctypes function can be passed to scipy. I think we can agree that anyone who is willing to put in that work for performance can be expected to run a test or two to make sure everything is working.
Two, we shelve the project until a better solution is available. This will probably require some alternative to ctypes, which is just too clunky to distribute well. Unfortunately, I think that shelving this till later will essentially kill it at this point.
Nathan