[SciPy-Dev] maintainership Sunday morning thoughts

[Ralf Gommers]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 1:51 PM, <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 7:29 PM, Charles R Harris <
> charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I wanted to share this excellent talk, "Rebuilding the cathedral", from
>>> Nadia Eghbal about how open source software gets maintained:
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6IpvTWwkQ
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the link, good talk.
>>
>> Considering the exponential growth in the number of users, I'm surprised
>> that NumPy/SciPy aren't completely swamped in bug reports. We're falling
>> behind, sure, but not as badly as might be expected.
>>
>
> I think it's because there is no "swamp of bugs".
> I have the impression in keeping roughly track of scipy issues and PRs
> that PR review and unit testing works very well so that only occasional
> bugs escape and bug the users.
>

Agreed, there's no swamp of bugs. Maybe a swamp of rough edges....

What we do struggle with is lack of progress on big-ticket items, e.g.
  - sparse arrays instead of (or in addition to) sparse matrices
  - replacing all the spline implementations (in interpolate, signal,
ndimage) with a single clean design
  - making ndimage consistent for the "is it a pixel or is it a data point"
question
Basically the stuff one can't do piece by piece but requires someone to sit
down for a couple of months. That requires luck (a person with the right
skills and motivation and time coming along) or funding.

Ralf



> Josef
>
>
>>
>>
>>> If you're a maintainer that experiences feeling guilty about not
>>> answering questions or reviewing PRs on Github quickly enough (I certainly
>>> do sometimes), or are a contributor that wonders why your well crafted PR
>>> doesn't get reviewed or merged, watching this talk may explain a few things.
>>>
>>> In terms of "rewards" for maintainership of SciPy, we could do better.
>>> One obvious thing is a paper that contributors can be co-authors on - this
>>> is one thing that we planned but didn't manage to do in the rush to get
>>> SciPy 1.0 polished and out the door. I'm seeing a bit of free time coming
>>> up, and fixing that omission is on my todo list for that time (really this
>>> time) - second email to follow shortly. More substantial rewards ($$) is a
>>> bit of a chicken-and-egg problem - it requires investing more time than
>>> anyone can put in at the moment to apply for funding. It'll be interesting
>>> to see how the dynamics of NumPy development change with the two grants for
>>> the next two years...
>>>
>>> Finally, a thank you to the people who've jumped in to fill the post-1.0
>>> code review gap we seem to be experiencing - mainly Ilhan, Andrew and Tyler.
>>>
>>>
>> Chuck
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> SciPy-Dev mailing list
>> SciPy-Dev at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-Dev mailing list
> SciPy-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20180121/b14333d7/attachment-0001.html>