[SciPy-dev] Renaming fftpack to fft, removing backends

[David Cournapeau]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For example, Python itself is a pretty good project for maintaining
> backwards compatibility. But behavior changes do happen, and
> deeply-diving codebases like Twisted do break on just about every new
> 2.x release. Because the changes are usually beneficial to a wide
> audience while the breakage is limited to small parts of libraries
> that are depending on mostly unspecified behavior, these changes are
> usually considered acceptable

Yes, but there is a difference: in python, it is clear how the
decision is made, and the decisions are motivated through a relatively
strong direction on where the project is going. Also, twisted is not
meant to be used interactively, I guess.

Scipy and numpy are two things: a library, and an interactive tool (or
at least a strong foundation for an interactive tool). For a library,
a renaming has low, if any value. Both arguments can be made, and
given than I consider you know more than I on numpy/scipy, I won't
proceed with the renaming in this precise case. But this puzzles me a
bit about what the scipy objectives are; maybe I am overstating it,
though.

>
> I don't see how it follows that taking my "middle ground" stance means
> that people won't discuss possibly-code-breaking changes they are
> making.

Sorry, that's was not clearly stated, let me rephrase it: I meant that
I feel like some changes as trivial as rename already happened before
in scipy/numpy, without any discussion. I am wondering why those
changes rather than other happened; there are some things I would like
to see changed in scipy in particular, and I don't want to start
endless discussions about every one of them. Of course, some things
will always have to be discussed, but having a somewhat formal process
would be helpful, if only as a filter for the dumbest ideas.

For other projects I am involved with, I have some kind of feeling of
what has a chance to be implemented/accepted, and what not. This is
not the case for scipy. This may well just be my own problem, though.

cheers,

David