On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Timothy Hochberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My personal opinion is that current matrix class is pretty useless and the > change won't help much from my point of view. My preference would be to > leave the matrix class alone, design a new matrix class, with a different > name, for 1.2 and then deprecate the old matrix class. Piecemeal fixing of > the matrix class is going to break someone's code and doesn't really get us > where we want to go.
Sort of +1. I am not a user of the numpy matrix, but I am increasingly feeling that we should leave them alone for the 1.1 release. This change was more or less rushed through at the end of the 1.1 development cycle due to both the feeling that there was an eminent and unique opportunity for API breakage and a near universal agreement that the current matrix behavior was less than ideal. However, we will be releasing 1.2 in a few months and it will be entirely possible to break the matrices API then if there is an agreement that it still needs to be done. It seems that the longer this discussion has gone on, the more alternative "fixes" that are proposed and discussed. Basically almost everyone who joins the discussion suggests yet a new fix. Also not all the NumPy/SciPy core developers have been following this discussion and I want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to become engaged in this conversation before we settle on even a minor change this late in the development cycle. Moreover, I think that given the numerous bug fixes that have gone into this release, it would be a shame if this somewhat last minute API break turns out to introduce even on new bug that we don't notice before the release. Finally, I would like to apologize for not proposing a more sensible process earlier for introducing API breaking code (I am learning as I go). As we turn our attention to developing 1.2, I am going to provide more formal phases to the development process. Any code that breaks API will be required to be introduced and committed during the beginning of the development cycle. And not in the very last phase of the development cycle when we should be focused solely on critical bugs, major regression, documentation, and extensive testing. So unless there are major objections, I am going to back out the matrices changes in the 1.1 branch. I will leave whatever changes have occurred in the trunk. Sorry if you feel I am overstepping my "authority". If so, please let me know. My goal is not to cut short discussion so much as to move the 1.1.0 release forward, so that we can get the numerous bug fixes and improvements to our users while also letting the developers start working on the next release (1.2) as soon as possible. Thanks, -- Jarrod Millman Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs 10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley phone: 510.643.4014 http://cirl.berkeley.edu/ _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
