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

Christopher Barker Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
Thu Feb 11 19:46:23 EST 2010


One question:

Does anyone think it's a good idea to provide any support for numpy 
version selection, similar to wxPython's wxversion? What it does is 
allow an installation to have default version that gets imported with 
"import wx". Optionally, other versions can be installed, and selected 
by calling:

import wxversion
wxversion.select(version_number)

before the first "import wx".

This was added to wxPython when there was a lot of API breakage going on 
(I think during the 2.4 - 2.6 transition). It's nice, because you can 
have a set of installed utilities that rely on a given version, and then 
develop your new stuff with a newer version without breaking anything.

In numpy's case, it might be messier, as there are a lot more packages 
that depend on numpy, but it could still be helpful, and in fact, maybe 
more necessary. Older versions of the MPL wx back-end were compiled 
against specific versions of wx, and wxversion was helpful for that.

Anyway, it seems the big isuue is when an ABI-incompatible version of 
numpy gets released, you can't even install it until you re-compile all 
the packages you may have that are built against numpy. With version 
selection, you could install and mess with it without breaking any 
running code.

It may be that virtualenv (and friends) is the "right" way to handle 
this now, however -- it wasn't around when wxversion was developed, and 
it may be a better way to keep a whole stack of packages compatible.

Any point in thinking more about this?

-Chris


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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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