[SciPy-Dev] GSOC - sparse improvements, dtypes introduction

[Ralf Gommers]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Blake Griffith
<blake.a.griffith at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
> The sparse matrix issues are the most interesting to me. I am reading up
> on issues with the package and testing them. However are there already
> enough people working on this?
>

Hi Blake, welcome. In my opinion it would be good to have a GSoC project on
this. One other student (Izzy) has expressed interest in it so far, but I
haven't seen a follow-up to his first email yet. Daniel Smith also wants to
continue improving this functionality outside of GSoC, but two is not a
crowd.

I haven't yet seen a situation where several students want to work on the
same topic, and we have no clear rules/policy. So I'll just point out a few
things that may be helpful in choosing a project:
- the projects listed on the ideas page aren't the only ones that we'll
consider. if you have another idea related to any of the main Scipy
submodules, that's perfectly fine. Given the interests of mentors and core
developers, I'd say these are good modules to work on (others are too small
or too much in need of maintenance):
sparse, optimize, stats, signal, interpolate, spatial, linalg, special.
- the application process is competitive. We'll have to rank proposals
anway, if we do get two proposals on the same topic we'll still rank them
according to the proposal quality, interaction with applicants on the
mailing list and the PRs made so far.

I'm trying to get a feeling for how much of a scope these bugs have, and
> what would be worthy of writing a proposal about.
>
> It seems like formulating a bool-handling specification would overlap a
> bit with the larger issues around dtype handling. Maybe there is a
> reasonable way to combine these without taking on too much work?
>

I'm not sure about that. If you're referring to the "Pythonic dtypes" idea,
then I think those are fairly orthogonal. The dtypes project would likely
be the more challenging of the two.

Cheers,
Ralf
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