On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 10:22 PM, Daπid <davidmenhur@gmail.com> wrote:

On 13 December 2014 at 13:34, Lars Buitinck <larsmans@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't, but I just checked the NumPy version that comes with various
> Linux distros so we can see what people are likely to have. There is
> no Ubuntu long-term support release that ships 1.5, only 1.4 (10.04)
> or 1.6 (12.04) [1]. Debian doesn't list 1.5 for any of its releases
> either [2]. CentOS 6 ships 1.4 [3], while CentOS 7 ships 1.7.1 [4].

Thanks for checking. The most recent Ubuntu LTS and CentOS releases are good data points in general I'd say. In this case Ubuntu (and Debian stable) are on 1.6.x, so keep that but drop 1.5.x then?

If you are using your OS's Numpy, you are likely to grab Scipy from there too.

As far as I know, the only reason why someone would not upgrade Numpy
is because they can't touch their systems, in which case the existence
of a newer version of Scipy is equally irrelevant. Furthermore,
compiling Numpy is easier than Scipy, so if you can update the later,
you should be able to upgrade both.

A lot more packages depend on numpy than on scipy, so upgrading numpy can have way more impact. And there may be institutes/companies that ship a fixed version of numpy that needs to be supported for a long time.

I think never versions of Scipy should just target maintained versions
of Numpy, for some definition of "maintained".

In principle only the last released numpy version gets new bugfix point releases, in exceptional cases maybe one version further back. So there's a good chance we'll get a numpy 1.9.2, little chance for a 1.8.3 and close to zero chance for a 1.7.3. I don't think that we can consider dropping numpy 1.7.x or 1.8.x support.

Ralf