[Numpy-discussion] view of recarray issue

[Ondřej Čertík]

Jay,

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Ondřej Čertík <ondrej.certik at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Jay Bourque <jay.bourque at continuum.io> wrote:
>> I'm actively looking at this issue since it was my pull request that broke
>> this (https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/350). We definitely don't want to
>> break this functionality for 1.7. The problem is that even though indexing
>> with a subset of fields still returns a copy (for now), it now returns a
>> copy of a view of the original array. When you call copy() on a view, it
>> copies the entire original structured array with the view dtype. A short
>> term fix would be to "manually" create a proper copy to return similar to
>> what _index_fields() did before my change, but since the idea is to
>> eventually return the view instead of a copy, long term we need a way to do
>> a proper copy of a structured array view that doesn't copy the unwanted
>> fields.
>
> This should be fixed for 1.7.0. However, I am going to release beta now,
> and then see what we can do about this.

What would be the best "short term" fix, so that we can release 1.7.0?

I am still trying to understand what exactly the problem with dtype is
in _index_fields().
Would you suggest to keep using the view, or somehow revert to the old
behavior while
still trying to pass all the new tests in your PR 350? If you have any hints,
it would save me some time.

Thanks,
Ondrej