[SciPy-dev] scipy.optimize.nonlin rewrite

[Pauli Virtanen]

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:10:53 +0200, Stéfan van der Walt wrote:
> 2008/11/30 David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp>:
>> Pauli Virtanen wrote:
>>> * Getting this to 0.7.0; this is a complete rewrite, so is it too
>>> late,
>>>   and is it better to wait for 0.8?
>>>
>> I would much prefer delaying this after 0.7 release. Unfortunately, I
>> have nothing else to say, since I know nothing to optimization :)
> 
> Postponing a patch often leads to the author losing interest, and to the
> patch never being applied.  I don't know if we can afford that. I'd be
> quite happy to see this going into 0.7 rc2 and trying it out for beta 1
> (or whatever the naming scheme is), especially if we can fine-tune the
> tests a bit.

Well, I promise not to lose interest if this gets delayed until 0.8 :)

The main reason for proposing this for 0.7.0 is that IMO having tolerance-
based termination conditions for these methods makes them much more 
useful, especially as they give only NaNs out if you set iter (the fixed 
number of iterations they do) too high.

But maybe it's best to play safe and ship 0.7.0 out first, and make sure 
the new nonlin.py is OK and well-tested in 0.8.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen