[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[Thomas Kluyver]

Thanks everyone for your comments.

Re IPython: Carlos confirms [1] that integration with Spyder is
improving considerably. Python(x,y) will probably throw the switch on
a newer version of IPython once Spyder 2.2 is released, which sounds
like it will be quite soon.

FreeImage: So does sk-image interface directly with the C++ library,
or does it need some existing wrapper like FreeImagePy? From the
sounds of it, we should include FreeImage and any wrapper sk-image
needs, with a view to including imageio in the future. Or perhaps we
should require FreeImage or PIL, and let distributions pick?

NumFOCUS: Thanks Travis, I think the support of NumFOCUS will be
invaluable for taking this forwards. For this discussion about the
standard, though, I think we're benefitting from a much wider audience
on scipy-central.

HDF5: Thanks for that description, Francesc. I'm leaning towards
specifying both PyTables and h5py. EPD, Anaconda, Python(x,y) and
WinPython already include both. I'm not clear on whether Sage & QSnake
do - I see no mention of HDF5 on Sage's package list. For the first
spec version, I think we should leave the inclusion of packages to
handle HDF4 and netCDF4 up to distributions, as it seems they're more
specialist.

[1] https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/2425

Best wishes,
Thomas