[SciPy-Dev] preparing for scipy 0.8 release

[Pauli Virtanen]

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:05:27 +0800, Ralf Gommers wrote:
> Now that scipy 0.7.2 and numpy 1.4.1 are out the door, it's time to look
> at what needs to be done for scipy 0.8.
> 
> Some questions
> - What needs to be done and what do you all want included that's not in
> trunk yet in terms of features / new code / code cleanups? 

I have these on my platter:

* http://github.com/pv/scipy-work/tree/superlu-update

  SuperLU 4.0, which includes support for incomplete LU decompositions,
  which at least I've been really missing in Scipy.

  New feature: scipy.sparse.linalg.spilu

  Needs just some tests, otherwise done. So if someone wants to test it
  or write some tests exercising splu and spilu, that'd be helpful!

* http://github.com/pv/scipy-work/tree/ticket/791-optimize-nonlin-rewrite

  New feature: scipy.optimize.nonlin rewrite

  Quite done, and with tests. However, scipy.optimize line searches take
  a ~20% performance hit because of the way I refactored them. If this
  doesn't sound good, I can try to rework it still more.

* Might be also nice to fix the remaining most serious scipy.special
  bugs.

> - Right now scipy trunk needs to be built against numpy trunk. Is it
> feasible to build against numpy 1.3 still, to get one 
> backwards-compatible release?
> If not, 0.8 should be released in parallel with numpy 2.0. - Time line:
> do we want a release before SciPy2010 (end of June)? If so, there's only
> a month left before a freeze. If not, we could just provide snapshot
> binaries in June.

As David said, we'll need at least Numpy >= 1.4, due to use of npymath.

It might be difficult to go for Python 3 support if we want to have 
backwards compatibility with Numpy 1.4, unless we go really ugly and 
start duplicating some of the utility functions inside Scipy. But from a 
maintenance POV that might be less of a burden than having to maintain 
0.8.x and 0.9.x simultaneously...

	Pauli