[SciPy-Dev] maintainership Sunday morning thoughts

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

On Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 8:02 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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
>

and at least differential equations, AFAIK as bystander


> 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.
>

I agree with all the requirements. However, it also needs some difficult
design work by experts or experienced developers.
E.g. How can general interpolating splines, smoothing splines, splines on a
one dimensional grid and splines on a nd dimensional grid be combined into
a single clean design without loosing ... (sounds between tough and
impossible to me)

Josef


>
>
> 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
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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