[Numpy-discussion] C-API change for 1.2

[David Cournapeau]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm slowly coming to the conviction that there should be no C-ABI changes in
> 1.2.

It does not make sense to revert those changes anymore, but we keep
having those discussions, and I still don't understand whether there
is a consensus here. Breaking a bit or breaking a lot is the same: we
broke API in 1.1, we are breaking in 1.2, will we break in 1.3 ? If we
we will always break when we "need" to, at least I would like to be
clear on that.

I personally think it is wrong to break API and ABI. I don't care
about the version where we break; I think the focus on the version is
a bit misplaced, because in python (and numpy), the version is
different from what is the norm in other big open source projects
anyway (in any open source project I know, breaking between N.x and
N.x+1 is a bug).

The focus should be the period of time you can rely on a stable API
(and ABI). Changing the API every three months sounds really wrong to
me, whatever the version is. That's something that most if not all
successful open source projects used by other ones do (gtk, qt, kde,
etc...). I don't see what's so different in numpy so that we could
afford doing something those other projects can't.

cheers,

David