[Numpy-discussion] Removing datetime support for 1.4.x series ?

[Fernando Perez]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 2:37 AM, Travis Oliphant <oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
> Perhaps one way to articulate my perspective is the following:
> There are currently 2 groups of NumPy users:
>  1)  those who have re-compiled all of their code for 1.4.0
>  2)  those who haven't

It may be useful to keep in mind one important aspect of the cascading
dependency effect we are dealing with here; I could recompile *my*
codes easily for numpy from svn (I used to do it routinely).  But with
an ABI break, there are a *ton* of packages now on my system that
would break if I put a new numpy in my python  path.  An easy way to
see this is to see how many system packages I'd have  to remove if I
removed numpy:

sudo apt-get remove python-numpy python-numpy-dbg python-numpy-doc

 [...]

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  impressive keyjnote mayavi2 music-applet python-gnuplot python-matplotlib
  python-mdp python-mvpa python-mvpa-lib python-netcdf python-numpy
  python-numpy-dbg python-numpy-doc python-pyepl python-pygame python-pywt
  python-rpy python-scientific python-scientific-doc python-scipy python-sparse
  python-sparse-examples python-tables python-visual pyxplot sagemath
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 26 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 341MB disk space will be freed.


Basically this means that if I want to update numpy on my  ubuntu 9.10
laptop, all  of a sudden not only do I have to recompile things like
my codes or scipy/matplotlib (which I'd expect), but I also  have to
rebuild 23 other system-installed packages which would probably
otherwise be fine.

For this reason, I've had to back off completely from using
post-abi-break numpy, I simply can't afford the time to break and
rebuild so much of  my system.

I know this is a messy and difficult situation, but I wanted to
illustrate this aspect of the dependency problem because I haven't
seen it mentioned so far in the discussion, and it's a fairly nasty
one.

Regards,

f