[SciPy-Dev] Policy for minimum numpy version

[Ralf Gommers]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 7:52 PM, Eric Quintero <ericq at caltech.edu> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> In gh-6058 <https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/gh-6058>, I’ve run into a
> test failure because a numpy function was not available in version 1.7 (the
> function being np.fft.rfftfreq). This is easy enough to work around, but I
> wonder when we should decide to move up the minimum required numpy version.
>

There's no conclusion here yet, but the other responses to this email were
examples of pain points with 1.8 and that the cost of upgrading numpy has
gone down.

In general I think we bump the minimum version if the costs are starting to
outweigh the benefits. That's probably the case for 1.7 now. Looking back,
we typically have supported 4 numpy versions with a scipy release. Right
now we're at 5 (1.7 - 1.11), and numpy 1.12 will likely be out before the
next scipy release.

So my conclusion: +1 for bumping the minimum numpy version to 1.8.2.

Ralf


> Debian stable currently offers numpy 1.8.2. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (which is EOL
> next April) is stuck on 1.6.1, so they’re already left behind. Ubuntu 14.04
> LTS has 1.8.2.
>
> Has anyone ran into compatibility issues with 1.7 before? In
> _lib._numpy_compat, there is another 1.7 workaround in place for
> np.testing.assert_warns.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20160803/cd3e67a8/attachment.html>