Hi Andrew: Here is what we currently say in our release notes concerning the Numeric/numpy question.
"(5.9.6) We have deprecated support for the python Numeric array extensions. Numeric is no longer maintained and users of Numeric are advised to migrate to numpy. Numpy has been the standard for PLplot for some time. If numpy is not present PLplot will now disable python by default. If you still require Numeric support in the short term then set USE_NUMERIC to ON in cmake. The PLplot support for Numeric will be dropped in a future release." (Note, USE_NUMERIC no longer exists, but we still provide a largely equivalent FORCE_NUMERIC option with a deprecation message concerning that if the user turns it ON.) If we continue providing a FORCE_NUMERIC user option, that means there is a PLplot maintenance issue now since Debian wheezy (and presumably most other modern Linux distros) no longer carries Numeric (last released in 2005) so it is difficult/impossible to test any changes in our Numeric support. For example, (which motivated this post to plplot-devel) while propagating the plshade* API changes to Python, I found myself with the unpleasant choice of either changing bindings/python/plplot.py.Numeric with absolutely no way of testing my changes even for syntax errors or else leaving it alone which means it won't work with the recent plshade* API changes if anybody ever tries it since there is a lot of type checking going on with the arguments to plshade*. (I opted to leave it alone.) Do you agree with me that it is now time to drop PLplot's support of Numeric? If so, I would be willing to do that (by forcing FORCE_NUMERIC to always be OFF rather than providing that as a user option) and make an additional announcement about dropping support for Numeric in the release notes. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
