[Numpy-discussion] NA masks in the next numpy release?

[Nathaniel Smith]

Hi all,

I was surprised today to notice that Mark's NA mask support appears to
have been merged into numpy master and is described in the draft
release notes[1]. My surprise is because merging it to mainline
without any discussion on the list seems to contradict what what
Travis wrote in July, that it was being developed as an experiment and
explicitly *not* intended to be merged without further discussion:

"Basically, because there is not consensus and in fact a strong and
reasonable opposition to specific points, Mark's NEP as proposed
cannot be accepted in its entirety right now. However,  I believe an
implementation of his NEP is useful and will be instructive in
resolving the issues and so I have instructed him to spend Enthought
time on the implementation. Any changes that need to be made to the
API before it is accepted into a released form of NumPy can still be
made even after most of the implementation is completed as far as I
understand it."[2]

Can anyone explain what the plan is here? Is the idea to continue the
discussion and rework the API while it is in master, delaying the next
release for as long as it takes to achieve consensus? Or is there some
mysterious git thing going on where "master" is actually an
experimental branch and the real mainline development is happening
somewhere else? Or something else I'm not thinking of? Please help me
understand.

-- Nathaniel

[1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/release/2.0.0-notes.rst
[2] http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2011-July/057579.html