[SciPy-Dev] dropping numpy 1.6.2 support

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi all,

It's been a year since we dropped support for numpy 1.5.1 and decided to
keep supporting numpy 1.6.2 for a while longer. There are regularly PRs
that need to be adapted because they fail with numpy 1.6.2, latest example
is https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/5641.

So proposal: drop numpy 1.6.2, and make numpy 1.7.2 the lowest supported
version. This gives us 4 supported numpy versions, which is enough for
users. Other consideration:
  - Ubuntu 14.04 (latest LTS version) is on 1.8.1 [2]
  - Debian stable is on 1.8.2 [3]
  - Centos 7 is on 1.7.1 [4]
So Centos is the only problematic one. We can either ignore Centos (they
really should be using the latest bugfix version of a minor release) or we
can check for >= 1.7.1 in scipy/__init__.py but test against 1.7.2 on
TravisCI.

For an impression of where we work around 1.6.2 things, try ``$ grin
"'1.7.0'"``

Thoughts?

Ralf


[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.scientific.devel/19283
[2]
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=numpy&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all
[3]
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=numpy&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all
[4] http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/
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