[SciPy-Dev] cKDTree

[Pauli Virtanen]

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 20:23:05 +0200, Sylvain Corlay kirjoitti:
[clip]
> This sort of raises the question of the scope of scipy. Should scipy go
> through the same sort of "big split" as Jupyter or more à la d3js? Is
> amount of specialized knowledge required to understand a methods part of
> what defines the line of division in what should be or not be in scipy?

To write a bit more on this, although I think it's difficult to give hard 
rules on what "generally useful and generally agreed to work" means, I 
would perhaps weigh the following against each other:

- Is the method used/useful in different domains in practice?
  How much domain-specific background knowledge is needed to use it
  properly?

- Consider the stuff already in the module.  Is what you are adding
  an omission?  Does it solve a problem that you'd expect the module
  be able to solve?  Does it supplement an existing feature in 
  a significant way?

- Consider the equivalence class of similar methods / features usually
  expected. Among them, what would in principle be the minimal set so
  that there's not a glaring omission in the offered features remaining?
  How much stuff would that be? Does including a representative one of
  them cover most use cases? Would it in principle sound reasonable to
  include everything from the minimal set in the module?

- Is what you are adding something that is well understood in the
  literature? If not, how sure are you that it will turn out well? 
  Does the method perform well compared to other similar ones?

- Note that the twice-a-year release cycle and backward-compat
  policy makes correcting things later on more difficult.

The scopes of the submodules also vary, so it's probably best to consider 
each as if a separate project --- "numerical evaluation of special 
functions" is relatively well-defined, but "commonly needed optimization 
algorithms" less so.

On a meta-level, it's probably also bad to be too restrictive on the 
scope, as telling people to go away can result to just that.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen