[Numpy-discussion] NumPy 1.14.0 release

[Allan Haldane]

On 01/14/2018 11:30 AM, Charles R Harris wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 4:35 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com 
> <mailto:matthew.brett at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 3:35 AM, Eric Wieser
>     <wieser.eric+numpy at gmail.com <mailto:wieser.eric%2Bnumpy at gmail.com>>
>     wrote:
>     > Did recarrays change? I didn’t see anything in the release notes.
>     >
>     > Not directly, but structured arrays did, for which recarrays are really just
>     > a thin and somewhat buggy wrapper.
> 
>     Oh dear oh dear - for some reason I had completely missed these
>     changes, and the justification for them.
> 
> 
> See https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/6053. It actually goes back a 
> couple of years.
> 
> 
>     They do exactly the kind of thing that Konrad Hinsen was complaining
>     about before, with justification, which is to change the behavior of
>     previous code, without an intervening (long) period of raising an
>     error.  In this case, the benefits of these changes seem small,
>     compared to the inevitable breakage and silently changed results they
>     will cause.
> 
>     Is there any chance of reversing them?

Of course the goal was to make things backwards-compatible; If some part 
of the changes is breaking a lot of code we will revert, or find a way 
to stop breaking code.

It's not yet clear to me which exact changes are causing the problem. 
The statsmodel failures may be related to what we are working on in one 
of these different issues:
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/10344
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/10387
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/10394

I will be checking the statsmodel unit tests as we fix things, to make 
sure they pass in the end.

Allan