[SciPy-Dev] schedule for scipy 0.9.0 [scipy.interpolate]

[Pauli Virtanen]

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:45:39 +0800, Ralf Gommers wrote:
> I'm interested to hear what you think about releasing scipy 0.9.0 in the
> near future, and if you have any things that should go in or be fixed
> for 0.9.0. If we want to keep to a ~6 month release schedule then we
> should branch around the end of this month and have a final release in
> January.

Sounds OK to me. I think we should try to time it so that it gets in 
Ubuntu.

Some tasks that would be nice to do before that in scipy.interpolate:

  - Write a interpolation routine for N-d *structured* interpolation.
    (ndimage.map_coordinates is difficult to find, so it would be useful
    to have an interpolation-oriented routine for that in
    scipy.interpolate).

  - Deprecate interp2d, as it does not work well for most problems,
    and its calling convention is a bit wonky. People should use either
    `griddata` or splines depending on what they want to do.

  - Clean up the spline routines:

    - We have two incompatible implementations for 1-D splines there,
      on from FITPACK, and a pure-Python one by Travis. I don't remember
      if one of them has an advantage over the other.

      I think that either `splmake` the one should be deprecated, or
      the spline representation it uses made compatible with FITPACK.

    - Deprecate the bispl* and spl* routines, leaving only the 
      object-oriented interface.

    - Clean up the OO API. Currently it does nasty things such as
      changing the class of the objects on the fly. I'd perhaps go
      forward by deprecating the current API, and starting with a clean
      slate.

Some additional ones that would be nice, but I'm not sure if I can make 
it in this timeframe:

  - Natural neighbor interpolation in N-d.

    I currently know how to do this up to 3-d, but doing it in N-d takes
    still more thinking (the difficult part is computing the volume of
    the N-d Voronoi polyhedron).

-- 
Pauli Virtanen