[SciPy-dev] [pymachine] moving code outside the sandbox into scikits ?

[David Cournapeau]

Hi,

Following a discussion with my mentor (Jarrod Millman) and Fernando
Perez, we decided to move most of the code useful for pymachine from
the scipy.sandbox to scikits.  Before doing so, we would like to
gather other's opinion.

Why ?

As part of my SoC project, I was planning to move some of the existing
scipy.sandbox code out of the sandbox (e.g., scipy.sandbox.pyem ->
scikits.machinelearning.em).  Now we are proposing to move that code into a
scikits package instead because:
1. this would give all the machine learning related code a unified
home under one common namespace
2. some of the code relies on ctypes, which is not allowed in scipy
3. some of the code uses matplotlib, which is not allowed in scipy
4. the code hasn't been as widely used as other parts of scipy
5. this would allow the code to be developed and released on its own
timeschedule independent of scipy

What ?

The concerned packages are:
 - scipy.sandbox.pyem
 - scipy.sandbox.svm
 - and possibly others (e.g., scipy.sandbox.ga, scipy.sandbox.ann)
And (just to be clear) scipy.cluster would remain where it is.

Potential problems?

The obvious consequence is that you will now need to install the new
scikits' package to use the code currently available in the
scipy.sandbox. As you need to install sandboxed code from the source
anyway, this shouldn't be too big of a problem.

Also the namespace changes, but that would be true if the code was
moved out of the sandbox as originally planned.

Better name for pymachine ?

We have been calling the project pymachine. But we would rather use a
more descriptive name for the scikit package (and one that doesn't
contain 'py').  Here are some ideas:
- scikits.learning
- scikits.learn
- scikits.machinelearning
- scikits.mlearn
What do you think of these names?  Does anyone have better name in mind?

If anyone has concerns with the above plan, please speak up!

Cheers,

D. Cournapeau, J. Millman, B. Hawthorne, and F. Perez