Re: when to deprecate numeric and numarray?
Perry Greenfield <
perry@...>
2007-04-04 14:22:08 GMT
On Apr 4, 2007, at 9:41 AM, John Hunter wrote:
> On 4/4/07, Andrew Straw <strawman@...> wrote:
>
>> Do we add deprecation warnings for the 0.90+1 release cycle and then
>> stop building the numarray and numeric numerix backends at some point
>> after that? When? Do we keep the "numerix" name or just switch
>> everything to numpy?
>
> I agree that it is about time to begin preparing for the switch. I
> was talking to Perry the other day about what an irony it was for him
> when he was writing the colormap support in mpl that he had to use all
> the takes and puts after spending so much effort in numarray to get
> more natural indexing and other features. So I think most everyone is
> ready to jettison the old stuff and move forward with the new. I've
> been waiting for the green light from STScI that they are mostly
> finished with their numarray->numpy migration since they have made
> significant contributions to mpl (and numerix) and if I recall
> correctly, I think Perry said they were mostly done, which means we
> should go forward. Perry?
We are done internally for all our released software and have
propagated these changes to our internal users (just this week as a
matter of fact). The most convenient time to remove the support for
numarray for us is when we make a public release of our software. The
date isn't fixed yet but that would probably be in June sometime. The
reason it is convenient for us to retain the numarray compatibility
until then is that we release a bunch of things together that people
can get as one download; taking numarray support out of mpl before
then means that people with the existing release will have to install
numpy if they want to upgrade mpl (and also face some confusion about
what kind of array object they are dealing with if they use functions
within mpl that create arrays).
Having said that, I've told John that I hate having held up the date
that the transition to pure numpy in mpl can be accomplished by, and
that if he wants to he can go ahead with it. So far he has been very
kind in waiting for us to finish our transition to numpy. So to
summarize on our end, the conversion to numpy has been completed and
tested by our developers, and now is being tested by our
institutional users, and sometime around June we will release our new
software. At that point, we have no desire or need to have any
further numarray option in mpl. I'll leave it to John to decide if he
wants to go ahead with that conversion in mpl now. The effect on our
user community probably isn't going to be great. By the time it is
done in mpl and is available to our community there should only be a
couple months, at most, where our users will have to deal with the
issue (and they can either wait to upgrade mpl after we release, or
deal with the installation/array issues that arise for the relatively
short duration.
Perry
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