On Thursday 02 May 2013 09:34:42 Alan W. Irwin wrote: > 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 Numeric is no longer maintained and users of Numeric are 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, I've gone ahead and made this change. I've been rather more radical and removed all mention of Numeric in the code. Testing suggests that this has had no impact on the numpy code, but I'd encourage others to check too. At the same time I've updated the python bindings to remove various deprecated features in numpy which were a hangover from Numeric. We used these to keep the support for Numeric simpler, but this is no longer necessary. The changes remove a compile warning with the latest versions of numpy. Andrew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. This 200-page book is written by three acclaimed leaders in the field. The early access version is available now. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/neotech_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
