[Numpy-discussion] NumPy SVN broken

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Travis Oliphant <oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
>
> I apologize for the mis communication that has occurred here.

No problem

>  I did not
> understand that there was a desire to keep ABI compatibility with NumPy 1.3
> when NumPy 1.4 was released.    The datetime merge was made under that
> presumption.
> I had assumed that people would be fine with recompilation of extension
> modules that depend on the NumPy C-API.    There are several things that
> needed to be done to merge in new fundamental data-types.
> Why don't we call the next release NumPy 2.0 if that helps things?
>  Personally, I'd prefer that over hacks to keep ABI compatibility.

Keeping ABI compatibility by itself is not an hack - the current
workaround is an hack, but that's only because the current way of
doing things in code generator is a bit ugly, and I did not want to
spend too much time on it. It is purely an implementation issue, the
fundamental idea is straightforward.

If you want a cleaner solution, I can work on it. I think the hour or
so that it would take is worth it compared to breaking many people's
code.

>   It
> feels like we are working very hard to track ABI issues that can also be
> handled with dependency checking and good package management.

I think ABI issues are mostly orthogonal to versioning - generally,
versions are related to API changes (API changes is what should drive
ABI changes, at least for projects like numpy).

I would prefer passing to "numpy 2.0" when we really need to break ABI
and API - at that point, I think we should also think hard about
changing our structures and all to make them more robust to those
changes (using pimp-like strategies in particular).

David