[SciPy-User] Arpack changes from 0.7.2 to 0.8.0

[Ralf Gommers]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 12:56 PM, <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Lutz Maibaum <lutz.maibaum at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 5:26 PM,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I think there is a problem that the function is shadowing the module.
> >> I remember I had problems with this before. I don't remember whether
> >> there was a work around.
> >
> > Thanks, that's what I thought. Was this done on purpose? It seems like
> > this is an API change that breaks backwards compatibility (that's how
> > I stumbled upon it). It would be nice if there was a warning in the
> > release notes, and/or in the scipy.sparse.linalg documentation.
>
> reading the thread again from jan 11
> [Numpy-discussion] TypeError: 'module' object is not callable
>
> I'm still not clear what was going on.
>
> The import into the sparse.linalg namespace was missing only for 2
> months, after ARPACK had been temporarily removed, between r:5154 and
> r:5527,   which it looks like was just when 0.7.0 was branched.
>
> I think I added the import in 5527 just to restore the previous state.
> I don't think this was an intended change in behavior.
>
> This removal in r5088 made
    import scipy.sparse.linalg.eigen.arpack as arpack
work, by accident. This was just before the 0.7.x branch was made, so there
it worked. The issue is that arpack.py contains a function called eigen, and
in eigen/__init__.py there is a line
    from arpack import *
and then the function gets added to eigen.__all__, which then in turn is
imported from one level up.

This looks like a bad idea, so either the module of the function should be
renamed. Or the functions in eigen.__all__ should not be made available in
the sparse.linalg namespace. But I'd prefer renaming.

Cheers,
Ralf
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