[Numpy-discussion] Looking for the most important bugs, documentation needs, etc.

[Ralf Gommers]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 4:20 AM, Six Silberman <silberman.six at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Some colleagues and I are interested in contributing to numpy. We have
> a range of backgrounds -- I for example am new to contributing to open
> source software but have a (small) bit of background in scientific
> computation, while others have extensive experience contributing to
> open source projects. We've looked at the issue tracker and submitted
> a couple patches today but we would be interested to hear what active
> contributors to the project consider the most pressing, important,
> and/or interesting needs at the moment. I personally am quite
> interested in hearing about the most pressing documentation needs
> (including example code).
>

As for important issues, I think many of them are related to the core of
numpy. But there's some more isolated ones, which is probably better to get
started. Here are some that are high on my list of things to fix/improve:

- Numpy doesn't work well (or at all) on OS X 10.7 when built with
llvm-gcc, which is the default compiler on that platform. With Clang it
seems to work fine. Same for Scipy.
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1951

- We don't have binary installers for Python 3.x on OS X yet. This requires
adapting the installer build scripts that work for 2.x. See pavement.py in
the base dir of the repo.

- Something that's more straightforward: improving test coverage. It's
lacking in a number of places; one of the things that comes to mind is that
all functions should be tested for correct behavior with empty input.
Normally the expected behavior is empty in --> empty out. When that's not
tested, we get things like http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/2078.
Ticket for "empty" test coverage:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/2007

- There's a large amount of "normal" bugs, working on any of those would be
very helpful too. Hard to say here which ones out of the several hundred
are important. It is safe to say though I think that the ones requiring
touching the C code are more in need of attention than the pure Python ones.


I see a patch for f2py already, and a second ticket opened. This is of
course useful, but not too many devs are working on it. Unless Pearu has
time to respond this week, it may be hard to get feedback on that topic
quickly.

Cheers,
Ralf
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