[SciPy-dev] Dataset for examples and license

[Stefan van der Walt]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 12:37:13AM -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
> David Cournapeau wrote:
> > I don't see any problem with that approach, and I am sure you know much 
> > better than me how to organize things for easy distribution. I think 
> > everybody agreeing on one file format is important (I have a preference 
> > for hdf5, since it is well supported under python through pytables, and 
> > has a full C api).
> 
> I don't agree. My design goal was to be able to expose a single interface
> (load()) in front of any file format or data source. I imagined that many of the
> data sources would be from other packages that are out of our direct control and
> which we did not want to copy-and-paste into our own repository.

I like the generic 'load()' approach.  I often work with large image
datasets, where you never want to load the whole thing into memory at
once.  The above interface would allow me to construct a cached
dictionary, which only returns an image on request.

Regards
Stéfan