[Numpy-discussion] NumPy 1.7 release delays

[Ralf Gommers]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io>wrote:

>
> Hey all,
>
> After some more investigation, I'm not optimistic that we will be able to
> get a 1.7 release out before SciPy.   I would like to get a beta release
> out by SciPy (or even an rc1 release).   But, given the number of code
> changes and differences between 1.5.x and 1.7, I think we will need an
> extended beta release stage for 1.7 that will allow as many users as
> possible to try out the new code base and report back any regressions or
> backward incompatibilities that need to be fixed before the final release.
>

+1


> The fundamental rule I think we have is that "code depending on NumPy that
> worked with 1.5.x should continue to work with 1.7 without alterations
> required by the user"
>

The rule should be 1.6.x imho. Undoing things that were changed in between
1.5.x and 1.6.x makes very little sense; numpy 1.6.0 has been out for over
a year.


> This does not mean we can't add new APIs or deprecate old APIs --- but I
> think that we do have to be much more careful about when deprecated APIs
> become unavailable.     There is a lot of code that assumes the current
> API.   Both code that is in released packages and code that is in
> "unreleased packages" which we are not even aware of.
>

I think you are mainly talking here about changes that had unintended
side-effects, and broke things without anyone realizing that in time. If
you read the 1.5.0, 1.6.0 and 1.7.0 release notes, there have been very few
actual deprecations.

Besides that, we have a long standing policy of removing those things that
do get deprecated after one minor release:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/wiki/ApiDeprecation. If you propose to
change that, I suggest discussing it in a separate thread.


> I don't want to finalize the 1.7 release until we get enough feedback from
> end-users about the impact of all the changes.   This will likely take a
> longer beta-release period than usual:  certainly not until after SciPy
> where we will make a concerted effort to get people to try the new 1.7 beta
> and report back on the impact on their code-base.
>
> Ondrej is helping out on this effort which I really appreciate.   Other
> people who have time to help with the release effort --- especially in
> fixing regressions will be greatly appreciated.
>

Did you happen to see
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/HOWTO_RELEASE.rst.txt? Among
other things, it lists a few things that are still to be done (merge doc
wiki edits, flip the "raise_warnings" switch) and details on the Wine /
MinGW setup that may be useful. I did just spot a mistake there by the way,
we're still on MinGW 3.4.5.

Cheers,
Ralf


We are also using this time to 1) setup Continuous Integration services for
> NumPy using both Jenkins and Travis-CI and 2) migrate the issue tracker to
> github.   Ondrej is heading up #1 and Ray Jones is heading up #2.    Please
> coordinate with them if you'd like to help out on any of those areas.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Travis
>
>
>
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