[pymvpa] PyMVPA 0.6? -> 2.0

[Michael Hanke]

Dear PyMVPA'ers,

you may have noticed that we were pretty reluctant to finally release
the next major version of PyMVPA. One major concern was the number of
people using our current stable series (0.4) and their worries how life
would become complicated once a new stable release would break the API.

We believe that we have now settled on a plan to address everybody's needs
as best as we can. The plan goes like this:

1. We won't break the API of the 'mvpa' python package. That package
   will always provide the 0.4 series of PyMVPA and we'll maintain it for as
   long as it is necessary/feasible. No new features will be added to it.

2. We will release the next major version of PyMVPA as an 'mvpa2'
   package (i.e. API version 2). This will be what we have been
   referring to as PyMVPA 0.6 so far. Following the principle of least
   surprise we'll bump the version of this release to 2.0.0.

What does it mean?

The old and the new PyMVPA will be co-installable on any system
without the need for any workaround or virtual environment. Your old
scripts will continue to run, but at the same time you'll also be able
to start using PyMVPA 2.0 for new projects.

There is a tiny annoyance for those who are already using the release
candidate versions of PyMVPA 0.6: you'll have to edit your scripts to
change

  from mvpa.suite import *

to

  from mvpa2.suite import *

but that's all there is to do.


We are currently running the final test series to make sure the renaming did
not have unexpected negative side-effects. Once this is done, you can expect
PyMVPA 2.0 to appear for download on http://www.pymvpa.org.

Thanks for your patience!

-- 
Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de