[Numpy-discussion] Removing datetime support for 1.4.x series ?

Travis Oliphant oliphant at enthought.com
Thu Feb 4 01:48:41 EST 2010


On Feb 2, 2010, at 11:59 PM, David Cournapeau wrote:

> Travis Oliphant wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 2, 2010, at 11:46 PM, David Cournapeau wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 12:23 PM, David Cournapeau
>>> <david at silveregg.co.jp <mailto:david at silveregg.co.jp>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sorry, my question was badly worded: besides the metadata  
>>>> pointer, is
>>>> there any other change related to the metadata infratructure  
>>>> which may
>>>> potentially change changes the publicly exported structures ? I  
>>>> wonder
>>>> whereas the metadata infrastructure can be kept in 1.4.x  
>>>> independently
>>>> of the datetime support without breaking the ABI
>>>
>>> FWIW, keeping the metadata pointer, and only removing datetime- 
>>> related
>>> things makes numpy 1.4.x backward compatible, at least as far as  
>>> scipy
>>> is concerned. So it seems the PyArray_Funcs change is the only
>>> ABI-incompatible change.
>>
>> What do you mean by the "PyArray_Funcs change"?
>
> The change that broke the ABI is in the PyArray_Funcs structure
> (ndarrayobject.h):
>
> struct {
>         PyArray_VectorUnaryFunc *cast[NPY_NTYPES];
>         ....
>
> Because NPY_NTYPES is bigger after the datetime change.
>
> If there is a way to have the datetime not expanding NPY_NTYPES,  
> then I
> think we can keep the ABI. I tried something with datetimes considered
> as user types, but did not go very far (most certainly because I have
> never used this part of the code before).

Thanks for reminding me what the ABI problem is.  Yes, that will break  
it (I was very suspicious that we could change the number of basic  
types without ABI consequence but didn't have time to think about the  
real problem).

My intention in adding the datetime data-type was not to try and  
preserve ABI in the process.

-Travis



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