Travis, apologies in advance if the tone of this message is too strong - please take it as a sign of how frustrating I find the discussion on this point.
On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:33 AM, Travis Oliphant <tra...@continuum.io>wrote: ... > What should have happened in this case, in my mind, is that NumPy 1.4.0 > should have been 1.5.0 and advertised that there was a break in the ABI and > that all extensions would have to be re-built against the new version. > This would have been some pain for one class of users (primarily package > maintainers) and no pain for another class. Please please stop asserting this. It's plain wrong. It has been explained to you multiple times by multiple people how bad the consequences of breaking the ABI are. It leads to random segfaults when existing installers are not updated or when users pick the wrong installer by accident (which undoubtedly some will). It also leads to a large increase in the number of installers that maintainers for every single package that depends on numpy will have to build. Including for releases they've already made in the past. The assertion that users nowadays mainly use bundles like EPD or package managers is also extremely pointless. Last week NumPy had over 7000 downloads on SF alone; the cumulative total stands at almost 1.7 million. If even 0.1% of those downloads are of the wrong binary, that's 7 users *every week* with a very serious problem. API breakage is also bad, and I'm not going to argue here about which kind of breakage is worse. What I will point out though is that we now have datetime merged back in while keeping ABI compatibility, thanks to Mark's efforts. That shows it's hardly ever really necessary to break the ABI. Finally, it has been agreed several times on this list to not break the ABI for minor releases, period. Let's please stick to that decision. Best regards, Ralf
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