[SciPy-User] Naming Ideas

[Fernando Perez]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> That has some upsides, like fitting in with the various SciPy
> conferences. But unless scipy-the-package were to be renamed, I think
> there would be a lot of confusion, e.g. about how to install
> scipy-the-package or scipy-the-stack. The friction for using the name
> Pylab seems lower, as it's not currently a project in its own right.

Every time this discussion comes up (not only in public, I've had it
in private many times too), we seem to go back to pylab and scipy as
the two names that stick.  I like scipy but I think it's too
overloaded at this point to easily disambiguate, and I agree with
Thomas that pylab *not* being a self-contained installable project
(other than a pylab.py file installed by matplotlib) is mostly a good
thing, though we may need to deprecate that to avoid ongoing
confusion.

So my vote at this point is for pylab, and if we do follow that route,
I suggest we coordinate with the matplotlib team to perhaps start
changing the docstring in that module and gradually deprecate it as a
standalone entry point.  Otherwise, it will inevitably cause confusion
between whatever is posted on a (yet to be created) pylab.org site and
what 'import pylab' produces.

Cheers,

f