[Numpy-discussion] Created NumPy 1.7.x branch

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 8:35 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 4:10 AM, Ondřej Čertík <ondrej.certik at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> My understanding is that Travis is simply trying to stress "We have to
>> think about the implications of our changes on existing users." and
>> also that little changes (with the best intentions!) that however mean
>> either a breakage or confusion for users (due to historical reasons)
>> should be avoided if possible. And I very strongly feel the same way.
>> And I think that most people on this list do as well.
>
> I think Travis is more concerned about API than ABI changes (in that
> example for 1.4, the ABI breakage was caused by a change that was
> pushed by Travis IIRC).
>
> The relative importance of API vs ABI is a tough one: I think ABI
> breakage is as bad as API breakage (but matter in different
> circumstances), but it is hard to improve the situation around our ABI
> without changing the API (especially everything around macros and
> publicly accessible structures). Changing this is politically
> difficult because nobody will upgrade to a new numpy with a different
> API just because it is cleaner, but without a cleaner API, it will be
> difficult to implement quite a few improvements. The situation is not
> that different form python 3, which has seen a poor adoption, and only
> starts having interesting feature on its own now.
>
> As for more concrete actions: I believe Wes McKinney has a
> comprehensive suite with multiple versions of numpy/pandas, I can't
> seem to find where that was mentioned, though. This would be a good
> starting point to check ABI matters (say pandas, mpl, scipy on top of
> multiple numpy).

I will try to check as many packages as I can to see what actual problems
arise. I have created an issue for it:

https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/319

Feel free to add more packages that you feel are important. I will try to check
at least the ones that are in the issue, and more if I have time. I will
close the issue once the upgrade path is clearly documented in the release
for every thing that breaks.

Ondrej