Proposal to move qutip.qip to a separate package

[Alex Pitchford]

The maintainers of QuTiP are proposing to move the QIP functionality from being a subpackage of qutip to a separate package of its own. Be assured that this would be done in a careful way with plenty of deprecation warning and co-existence for some time.

The idea is part of a wider scope plan to make an ecosystem of qutip- packages. The main qutip package will remain focused on quantum system evolution solvers, but become solely this. We are also looking to fix on the limited set of requirements for qutip being Numpy, Scipy and Cython (build only). And so any new feature extensions requiring other libraries would naturally become family packages.

As such the QIP separation is a test of principle and something of a practice run for this family idea. There are many other candidates, both currently inside of qutip, and waiting on the sidelines, to join the family / become officially associated. We are hoping that this will open the way for more new additions to the qutip ecosystem as well. That is, encourage the development of packages that work with qutip. Note that we imagine two types of qutip related package:

• 'family' developed and maintained by pretty much the same group of people as the main package. Described and distributed on qutip.org
• 'associated' developed and maintained by other groups. Linked and promoted on qutip.org

We welcome the input of the community. No final decision will be made on this until the community has had chance to comment. The place to do that is on Github, see the Discussion.

[Simon Cross]

Hi Alex,

Is the idea that qutip.qip would become a separate but namespaced package so that people using `qutip.qip` could, e.g., `pip install qutip-qip` and then go on using `qutip.qip` mostly as before?

Schiavo

Simon

[Alex Pitchford]

Hi Simon,

If this is possible, then that would be very cool. But is that technically feasible?

If so, then maybe you could make the suggestion here

https://github.com/orgs/qutip/teams/qip-devs/discussions/5

and explain how this could be implemented.

Thanks

Alex

[Alex Pitchford]

So it seems that in order to see and post on GH team discussions you need to be a Member of the QuTiP organisation.

If you want to get involved, then please post your GH username here and I can add you as a member.

Otherwise you can just post your views and ideas here.

Alex

[Simon Cross]

Woot. My GH username is hodgestar.