[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 23 September 2012 20:42, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> Then we should talk to the EPD folk about whether that can be fixed.

Certainly. But if they disagree (it would be a big expansion, and they
offer a more complete commercial version), we needn't completely
revise the standard to accomodate that.

> And then in the next sentence I also mentioned that there's no value
> in telling people to do things that they won't do...?

I hope that including a newer version of IPython is something that
Python(x,y) *will* do. This is the intermediate point you were
describing: not something that everyone already has done, but
something that we can reasonably expect people to do.

I'm taking a longer term view: Pylab needn't be a description of the
userbase on the day it launches. Many users don't use a Python
distribution, so there's almost no minimum set of packages you can
assume people have installed today. But with plenty of communication
and elbow grease, I hope that in, say, 6 months, the idea will have
enough traction with users and distributions that you can write code
and say "runs on Pylab 2.0", and users will either have it or be able
to get it easily.

We're certainly not insisting that distributions implement the spec at
once, but we're giving them a (fairly reasonable, I think) set of
targets to work towards. Some distributions already meet it, others
may need to update a package or two.

Best wishes,
Thomas