[Numpy-discussion] Possible Deprecation of np.ediff1d

[Charles R Harris]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 8:05 PM Stephan Hoyer <shoyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 10:30 AM Tyler Reddy <tyler.je.reddy at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Chuck suggested (
>> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/11805#issuecomment-416069436 ) that
>> we may want to consider deprecating np.ediff1d, which is perhaps not much
>> more useful than np.diff, apart from having some arguably strange prepend /
>> append behavior added in.
>>
>> Related discussion on SO:
>> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39014324/difference-between-numpy-ediff1d-and-diff
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Tyler
>>
>
> I don't think there's much to be gained by dropping edit1d from NumPy.
> It's really not a maintenance burden to keep it around unchanged.
>
> My preference, in keeping with our tradition of not unnecessarily causing
> disruption, would be to keep this function around but mention that np.diff
> should be preferred for almost all use cases in the docs. This is "Official
> discouragement" strategy that came up in the recent discussion about our
> deprecation policy:
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2018-July/078474.html
>
> I did a search in Google's codebase and turned up only a handful of uses
> (~20 uses total) but in a variety of different projects:
> - It appears in astropy, dask, pandas, pint, scipy and TensorFlow.
> - It used in six different internal projects
>

Maybe we need a "NumpyObsoleteWarning" :) At the least, we should probably
have a list of obsolete functions in the documentation somewhere. My main
concern is that as we go forward we might end up supporting a bunch of
functions that are seldom used and have better replacements. We need some
method of pruning.

Chuck
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