[Numpy-discussion] ticket 2228: Scientific package seeing ABI change in 1.6.x

[Ralf Gommers]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 9:26 PM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io>wrote:
>
>> The NPY_CHAR is not a "real type".   There are no type-coercion functions
>> attached to it nor ufuncs nor a full dtype object.      However, it is used
>> to mimic old Numeric character arrays (especially for copying a string).
>>
>> It should have been deprecated before changing the ABI.  I don't think it
>> was realized that it was part of the ABI (mostly for older codes that
>> depended on Numeric).   I think it was just another oversight that
>> inserting type-codes changes this part of the ABI.
>>
>> The positive side is that It's a small part of the ABI and not many codes
>> should depend on it.   At this point, I'm not sure what can be done, except
>> to document that NPY_CHAR has been deprecated in 1.7.0 and remove it in
>> 1.8.0 to avoid future ABI difficulties.
>>
>> The short answer, is that codes that use NPY_CHAR must be recompiled to
>> be compatible with 1.6.0.
>>
>>
> IIRC, it was proposed to remove it at one point, but the STScI folks
> wanted to keep it because their software depended on it.
>

I can't find that discussion in the list archives. If you know who from
STScI to ask about this, can you do so?

Is replacing NPY_CHAR with NPY_STRING supposed to just work?

Ralf
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