[Numpy-discussion] Created NumPy 1.7.x branch

[David Cournapeau]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:17 AM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io> wrote:
>
> On Jun 25, 2012, at 10:35 PM, David Cournapeau 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).
>
> In the present climate, I'm going to have to provide additional context to a comment like this.  This is not an accurate enough characterization of events.   I was trying to get date-time changes in, for sure.   I generally like feature additions to NumPy.   (Robert Kern was also involved with that effort and it was funded by an active user of NumPy.    I was concerned that the changes would break the ABI.

I did not mean to go back at old history, sorry. My main point was to
highlight ABI vs API issues. Numpy needs to decide whether it attempts
to keep ABI or not. We already had this discussion 2 years ago (for
the issue mentioned by Ondrej), and the decision was not made. The
arguments and their value did not really change. The issue is thus
that a decision needs to be made over that disagreement in one way or
the other.

David