[SciPy-Dev] preparing for scipy 0.8 release

[Warren Weckesser]

Ralf Gommers wrote:
> <resending because mail server seems to have swallowed it the first 
> time. apologies if you get it twice.>
>

It looks like the mail server was "stuck" for a while.

>
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Ralf Gommers 
> <ralf.gommers at googlemail.com <mailto:ralf.gommers at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Pauli Virtanen <pav+sp at iki.fi
>     <mailto:pav%2Bsp at iki.fi>> wrote:
>
>         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. 
>
>
>     So merging/fixing this in the next month is feasible for you?
>      
>
>         > - 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...
>          
>
>     The number of fixes in the 0.7 series is small, so I'm not sure if
>     the maintenance burden is really that high (besides possibly
>     having to do an extra maintenance release). It depends on how long
>     you'd want to keep compatibility with numpy 1.4. Anyway, both
>     options sound better than having no compatible release at all.
>
> I thought about it some more, and a backwards compatible release with 
> numpy 1.4.1 that is also compatible with numpy 2.0 is not even 
> possible. And compatibility with 1.4.0 is not nearly as useful. So two 
> releases would really make sense: 0.8 built against numpy 1.4.1 and 
> 0.9 against numpy 2.0 with py3k compatibility.
>
> Here's a proposal for the release schedule:
> 30/05: create 0.8.x branch, beta available, trunk open to add py3k 
> compatibility
> 11/06: 0.8 release candidate 1
> 22/06: 0.8 release
>

Looks good to me.


> 15/08: create 0.9.x branch, first beta
> 22/08: 0.9 release candidate 1
> 01/09: 0.9 release
>
> How does this sound?
>
> Ralf
>
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