[Numpy-discussion] Going toward time-based release ?

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 00:39 -0600, Charles R Harris wrote:


> 
> Which makes the spot where a gets initialized almost invisible. It is
> amazing how much easier the code is to read and understand with these
> simple changes. But if we plan tasks for the release, then we also
> have to assign people to the task. That is where it gets sticky.

That's exactly why I am suggesting a time-based release; that's the kind
of  stuff I want to see in numpy (< 2.* ) and scipy (< 1.*). The way I
saw things was: it is ok to do this kind of changes, but only N days
before the official release. After this point, the only (and I really
mean only) reason is a critical bug. It is really easy to think "hey,
let's do this one line change, that can't possibly break anything,
right ?", and two days after: "hey, this breaks on windows because VS
does not recognize this code". If between the two days, you have
released numpy, you're screwed.

Doing this with a time schedule is easier, I think.

FWIW, I am doing exactly this for scipy.fftpack right now, and that's a
lot of relatively boring work (fftpack is a bit special because it has a
big list of possible combination dependencies with different code paths,
and testing all of them is painful, but doing this in numpy.core is not
that much easier).

cheers,

David