[SciPy-Dev] New documentation section: "SciPy API Development Guide"

[Ralf Gommers]

On Sat, May 9, 2020 at 5:43 AM Warren Weckesser <warren.weckesser at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I just created a pull request in which I started a new subsection of
> the developer documentation called the "SciPy API Development Guide".
> As I write this, the CircleCI artifact containing the new page is
>
>
> https://19020-1460385-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/html-scipyorg/dev/api-dev/api-dev-toc.html
>
>
That looks like a good idea to me, thanks Warren. So far this lived at the
bottom of the core developer guide:
http://scipy.github.io/devdocs/dev/core-dev/index.html#module-specific-instructions.
Could you move the scipy.special docs there over to this new API
Development Guide?

The first item to be included in this section is a design
> specification for the `nan_policy` argument that is used in many
> functions in `scipy.stats`.  We'll be adding `nan_policy` to more
> functions, so I think it will be helpful to have an explicit design
> spec in the docs that we all agree on.
>

+1 that would be super helpful.


> Two more topics to be added to the guidelines soon:
> * Creating probability distributions in stats: a guide to subclassing
> rv_continuous and rv_discrete.
> * Modifying return values to allow objects with attributes while
> maintaining backward compatibility with existing return values that
> are tuples or NamedTuples.
>

Both of these also sound very useful. For namedtuples, you probably should
also include or at least reference the Bunch design pattern (we have it in
`integrate` and `signal`, there's still an open issue for `stats`).

Cheers,
Ralf


> I'm currently focused on `stats`, but this section is meant for any
> API guidelines or conventions that we use but that are currently only
> stored in our heads, in old mailing list or github threads, or in a
> few implementations here and there in the code.
>
> Take a look and let me know what you think.
>
> Warren
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-Dev mailing list
> SciPy-Dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/attachments/20200509/c8f77fa9/attachment.html>