[SciPy-Dev] scipy.stats

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

Since Travis seems to want to take back control of scipy.stats, I am
considering my role as inofficial maintainer as ended.

I would have appreciated his help almost 3 years ago, when I started
to learn numpy, scipy, and started to submit patches for
scipy.stats.distributions.

But by now, I have pretty strong opinions about statistics in python,
after almost  three years, I'm a bit tired of cleaning up the mess of
others (and want to clean up my own mess), and there are obviously big
philosophical differences for the development process between me and
Travis (no discussion, no review, no tests).
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/log/trunk/scipy/stats/tests

Watching the scipy changelog and checking any function that Travis
quietly commits is no fun (see mailing list for the introduction of
curve_fit or ask Stefan).

I said early on that I would like to trust the results that
scipy.stats produces (although I don't find the mailing list thread
any more).

I considered scipy to go into a stable direction like Python is,
kitchen sink for scientific programming, which might be slow-moving
but with high standards, and not a sandbox.

Details are at http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2010-April/014058.html

After my initial scipy.stats.distributions cleanup, test coverage was
at 91%, I have no idea where it is after this weekend.

This is more about the process then the content, distributions was
Travis's baby (although unfinished), and most of his changes are very
good, but I don't want to look for the 5-10% (?) typos anymore.

Cheers,

Josef