On 24/05/15 17:13, Anne Archibald wrote: > Do we want a deprecation-like approach, so that eventually people who > want replicability will specify versions, and everyone else gets bug > fixes and improvements? This would presumably take several major > versions, but it might avoid people getting unintentionally trapped on > this version. > > Incidentally, bug fixes are complicated: if a bug fix uses more or fewer > raw random numbers, it breaks repeatability not just for the call that > got fixed but for all successive random number generations.
If a function has a bug, changing it will change the output of the function. This is not special for random numbers. If not retaining the old erroneous output means we break-backwards compatibility, then no bugs can ever be fixed, anywhere in NumPy. I think we need to clarify what we mean by backwards compatibility for random numbers. What guarantees should we make from one version to another? Sturla _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
