Status of project?

[xd009642]

Just wondering what's happening with ndarray (and the future 0.14.0 release). It looks like there hasn't been much activity in recent months. Just curious btw (and willing to assist in any PRs if help is wanted)

[sergree]

Same question.

[bluss]

Hi - good question.

I haven't had all that much time lately, as is evident. We need a new plan for maintainership, since the current maintainers are busy or don't have time. I myself have enough time to answer questions, hand over and help with releases and release planning.

In my view we need something more than just merging PRs, which is prioritization and making releases. My view on maintainership is that there is no use in merging a PR without a plan for when and how it will be "shipped" - in a release.

I can answer and help on all issues that are general, about the data structure and library internals, but I don't have the time to look at numerical algorithms.

As discussion forum I would recommend using the issues here and alternatively looking into room #rust-sci:matrix.org on the matrix chat network (not very active).

[xd009642]

Well I'd be willing to help out, although I'd need some time to get familiar with things internally and what the current goals are. I'll take a look at the matrix room as well 👀

It might be a naive approach but I'd consider going through all the PRs that don't add any breaking changes just bug fixes and small features and making a 0.13.2, then seeing what's left and working out what would be wanted for 0.14.0.

[bluss]

Sounds reasonable too - I expect there isn't much there. Updating deps, and landing something with stack and concatenate seems to be the most important (both breaking), so that could be the small goal for 0.14.

[xd009642]

Looking at PRs that could be for a patch release

• Add conversions from nalgebra types #554
• Pairwise summation #577 (I saw some perf stats on it, not sure if this is ready yet or more work needs doing)
• Implement PartialEq/Eq for SliceInfo #689

Yeah just looking at what PRs pass and are marked with breaking changes:

• Add support for inserting new axes while slicing #570
• Implement arithmetic ops on more combinations of types #744
• Stack and concatenate #844 looks like it needs work, but it is stack & concat

[ZuseZ4]

#810 would also be a breaking change.
I'm note sure how much these bumps will improve performance wise, but since they should come basically for free, I guess they could be interesting.

[bluss]

@xd009642 Merging a PR straight up because it passes is not exactly my philosophy, but if we should have some progress, we shouldn't just listen to me(!) :) We also need to think we have the right design and a plan to release it.

A few of the changes in current master are unfortunately unreleased - but if I'm not mistaken they are non-breaking and are nice minor improvements, like #814 and #809

[xd009642]

Oh yeah agreed just merging all the things isn't a good strategy, I just figured cutting down the list of PRs to ones to make a decision on would be useful and then hopefully merge or decline them 😄

As for design I generally hold the view that a feature is good if the design/performance are satisfactory and:

• If it makes ergonomics easier at little cost (I think Implement PartialEq/Eq for SliceInfo #689 falls into that ballpark)
• If it adds features that are in numpy but not ndarray that's a good thing.
• It's came out of design discussion and there's a good motivation for it.

For the patch PRs I identified, PartialEq for slices looks useful to me -although it may need some work/answers regarding dyn? I'm not sure about #577 I don't understand what it's doing enough yet. As for #554 I'm less sure about that one, it goes up to nalgebra 0.16 and the latest version is 0.22. Instead I'd consider just updating the docs to point to https://github.com/rust-cv/nshare which has ndarray/nalgebra conversions in and doesn't put a maintenance burden on ndarray.

[andrei-papou]

@xd009642 small clarification regarding #844 . This change is not a breaking one so it can be released in 0.13.2.

[bluss]

@xd009642 So what's the action item in this issue, do you want to be a maintainer and help accepting PRs (with an eye for how it fits into being released soon)? 🙂

I'm clear with what I can do in comment #843 (comment) - from my view it means we don't merge numpy-like algorithms and numerics, unless there is someone else who can review it.

I have some time now, but I would like to either go right for 0.14.0 or 0.13.2 and then immediately 0.14. That is because to me it is clear that we can't wait with bumping deps, so it's useless to work on only non-breaking changes.

[xd009642]

@bluss I'm happy to be a maintainer and help if you'll have me 😄. And going straight to 0.14 is personally fine by me, keeping things simple by minimising the amount of work is always fine with me

[ZuseZ4]

@xd009642 Do you have any branch where you are working on merging the different PR?
I might be able to help by douple-checking your changes or helping with smaller fixes.

[xd009642]

Not yet, I was considering creating a branch where I roll up a few different PRs but I haven't had the time this week. I can try and do something over the weekend though 😄

[ZuseZ4]

Sounds great. I will try to watch out for it, but also feel free to ping me here or on zulip.

[bluss]

Let's do the work on the PRs here in the repo I think, then we won't duplicate work I hope (does that make sense?)