[SciPy-Dev] An inconsistency in scipy.optimize.minimize

[Pauli Virtanen]

Hi,

16.02.2014 06:22, Yuxiang Wang kirjoitti:
> Sorry about digging this out again... As well as not knowing how to
> contribute my effort to SciPy. Sorry about being ignorant in how to
> participate in an open-source project, but what is the suggested step
> that I should do next? Should I:
> 
> 1) Report this issue on github
> 
> 2) Fix the code
> 
> I could do both, but the code would be only on my personal machine and
> not thoroughly tested... Could anyone please help and get me started
> on that?
> 
> Thanks so much!
> 
> -Shawn
> 
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Yuxiang Wang <yw5aj at virginia.edu> wrote:
>> Aaron,
>>
>> Thanks for confirming! I agree that epsilon is better, as in the
>> following functions "epsilon" instead of "eps" are used:
>>
>> scipy.optimize.fmin_cg
>> scipy.optimize.fmin_ncg
>> scipy.optimize.fmin_tnc
>> scipy.optimize.fmin_bfgs
>> scipy.optimize.fmin_l_bfgs_b

The overall situation is that `fmin_*` exist only for backward
compatibility, and may be deprecated at some point if this seems
sensible. Everything that they can do, also minimize() can do.

minimize() was introduced to provide a standard interface with
consistent parameter names, since the fmin_* were inconsistent between
each other.

It does not seem wise to me for us to start changing the parameter names
in minimize() again, just for aesthetic reasons.  This will break
backward compatibility, and moreover, users of minimize() should not
need to use the fmin_* functions.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen