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

[David Cournapeau]

Pauli Virtanen wrote:

> 
> Making structures opaque is a bit worrying. As far as I understand, so
> far the API has been nearly compatible with Numeric.

I assumed that we would simply give up the Numeric compatibility - does 
it really matter for a NumPy which is at best out in 2011/2012 ? It is 
not like NumPy 1.X is going away soon in any case. OTOH, I don't used 
any code based numeric, so I understand it is easy to say for me :)

Also, I would have hoped that some inconsistencies w.r.t. reference 
counting could be fixed. It is my understanding that those are mostly a 
consequence of how Numeric used to do things.

> Making the
> structures opaque is going to break both our and many other people's
> code. This is a bit worrying...
> 
> How about a less damaging route: add reserved space to critical points
> in the structs, and keep appending new members only at the end?

I don't think it would help much. It requires to know where changes are 
needed, and I don't think it is really possible. The goal would be to 
keep a compatible ABI throughout the whole 2.x series.

Maybe it would be possible to develop some automatic conversion scripts 
ala 2to3, but for the C code, to make the transition. Anything related 
to changes from direct access to accessors should be fairly automatic.

> The
> Cython issue will probably be mostly resolved by new Cython releases
> before the Numpy 2.0 would be out.

It is already solved - I mentioned earlier that by removing datetime as 
a dtype (but keeping the metadata structure), and by regenerating the 
few cython files with Cython 0.12.1, the ABI is kept compatible (at 
least as far as scipy constitutes a reasonable test).

cheers,

David