[Numpy-discussion] What is consensus anyway

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Wed Apr 25 10:01:30 EDT 2012


On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> That is one of the reasons that the smaller
> scikits attract people, they have more freedom to do what they want and
> fewer people to answer to. Scipy also has some of that advantage because
> there are a number of packages to choose from. The more strict the process
> and the more people to please, the less appealing the environment becomes.

A quick look shows ~100,000 downloads of 1.6.1 via PyPI. SF.net shows
>600,000 numpy downloads in the last 12 months. I'm afraid the numpy
developers have a lot of people to please, whether they like it or not
:-).

OTOH I'm still confused at what kind of strictness you're worried
about in practice. Not too many of those people actually show up on
the mailing list, and usually the problem is convincing those that
*do* show up into actually expressing their needs rather than just
assuming that "real developers" must know better. Fernando spoke
eloquently in this thread in support of consensus, and IPython doesn't
seem to be laboring under a strict process that's driving away
developers. AFAICT whole-heartedly adopting the consensus idea would
only have actually altered one (!) decision in the project to date,
which is not exactly jack-booted as these things go.

- N



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