Making array types support public & SciPy 2.0

Small correction: none of those were decided on, it was more a “not to be considered before 2.0”.

I think the first thing to agree on is the principles for the release, in particular this:

Most of the items on that wiki page seem like they’d clash with this. For a 2.0 release along the lines I described, we’re only removing some already-deprecated things (possibly with 1-2 exceptions) and do a few more impactful deprecations. A six month timeline is easily compatible with that. The most work will be the actual preparation for making the array types support public.

As for concrete items on that list:

  • Already deprecated things are the compat shims for private APIs and possibly scipy.misc (since all its namespace members are deprecated).
  • Removals of APIs that aren’t yet deprecated (fftpack, mstats, ltisys/wavelets/splines, signal.cwt, sparse matrices, cKDTree, changes of return types away from tuples): that would all be out of scope.
    • uarray is the one that maybe we could get away with, since there are only a few large users and that functionality is essentially being replaced in large part by the dispatching on array types we will now make public
    • I’d also say that most of this is low-prio and if we want to get rid of it, a deprecation could be done in any regular feature release
  • rng keyword behavior changes is the one item that seems relevant and we’ve been working towards for a while.

Do you agree with the principles I proposed, or are you advocating for a much more breaking major release @j-bowhay?