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

[Charles R Harris]

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.

<snip>

Chuck
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