[SciPy-dev] The future of SciPy and its development infrastructure

[Travis E. Oliphant]

I've written a lot of response to various comments and I'd like to 
summarize and extend a few of my comments:

1)  We absolutely need to improve the quality of SciPy, and that does 
mean more tests, documentation, and reviews --- and most importantly 
faster releases.    Right now, a release happens when someone steps up 
to be a release manager and commits to making it happen.    I don't know 
how to promise that on a regular cycle with only volunteer effort.    I 
would love to have the resources to fund SciPy release management.

2)  I think we are doing a decent job of commits having tests and 
documentation.    We should continue to remind each other of the need 
for quality code in SciPy (and continue to clean up code that is there).

3) There are pieces of SciPy that need work (interpolate stands out most 
in my mind right now).    I have changes to the interpolate code that I 
have not yet committed because I was waiting for the release of 0.7 but 
I really want to commit.  Who is interested in reviewing this?  I'm 
happy to work with additional eyes, but my current workflow is "commit 
code I think is working along with some tests and docstrings", and then 
let review/improve happen on the trunk.    I don't really like having 
lots of branches checked out of a code-base in order to manage a 
different workflow.  I'm open to being educated about approaches that 
work better. 

4) Bug-fix commits are a different thing than feature-enhancement 
commits.   We should have different expectations of them. 

5) We do have scikits for more experimental additions to live so that 
SciPy should become more of a stable, documentation-rich library.  But, 
the problem there is distribution.   EPD and Enstaller (our BSD-licensed 
version of setuptools) is one answer to that distribution problem.   
There are others.

6) I very much appreciate all the work people do on SciPy.    I think 
our biggest lack more than anything else is the "full-time" person that 
can respond to the user community and keep the momentum moving.

-Travis