VOTE: Voting issue for PDEP-15: Reject adding PyArrow as a required dependency

[datapythonista]

Locked issue

• I locked this voting issue so that only voting members are able to cast their votes or comment on this issue.

PDEP number and title

PDEP-15: Reject PDEP-10

Pull request with discussion

#58623

Rendered PDEP for easy reading

https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/c159851cc0762625f9e51f9d9bd1d18011b79aa7/web/pandas/pdeps/0015-do-not-require-pyarrow.md

Discussion participants

5 voting members (active maintainers) participated in the discussion

Voting will close in 15 days.

2025-06-22

Vote

Cast your vote in a comment below.

• +1: approve.
• 0: abstain.
  • Reason: A one sentence reason is required.
• -1: disapprove
  • Reason: A one sentence reason is required.
    A disapprove vote requires prior participation in the linked discussion PR.

@pandas-dev/pandas-core

[datapythonista]

-1

While there are surely some challenges and costs of requiring PyArrow, I think the benefits of already requiring PyArrow in pandas 3.0 are enough to justify the requirement. If pandas becomes simpler, faster and better for most users, and for the development of the project, and the cost is few edge cases having to stay in pandas 2.0 or find an alternative lightweight technology, that's fine with me. Also, the sooner we require PyArrow, the sooner the issues with PyArrow will be addressed, and most of the original concerns have been addressed anyway (including unsupported architectures, reducing installation size, support for wasm...).

[simonjayhawkins]

-1

rejecting PDEP-10 is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The issue appears to be just the timing of making PyArrow the required dependency. Of course if others want to reject PDEP-10 and propose keeping PyArrow an optional dependency indefinitely then that's a different issue and I would potentially vote differently on that.

[rhshadrach]

A call for vote is in violation of PDEP-1.

• After 30 days, with a note that there is at most 30 days remaining for discussion, and that a vote will be called for if no discussion occurs in the next 15 days.
• After 45 days, with a note that there is at most 15 days remaining for discussion, and that a vote will be called for in 15 days.
  ...
  After 30 discussion days, in case 15 days passed without any new unaddressed comments, the authors may close the discussion period preemptively, by sending an early reminder of 15 days remaining until the voting period starts.

The timeline requires a 15 day announcement to commence with voting. This has not occurred.

[datapythonista]

Thanks for pointing that out @rhshadrach.

This PDEP is stalled, Thomas is not an active maintainer anymore, and I don't think there are technical details to discuss here. In my opinion it's just a formal document to reject PDEP-10, with a summary of the reasons. While it's nice to have the summary, I don't think a PDEP was necessary in the first place, we could also have voted again on PDEP-10 instead, or just vote via email as we used to do. In that sense feels a special PDEP.

Also, I don't think it makes sense to only allow people who commented in the PDEP to vote. This PDEP didn't have a technical discussion in the sense of defining an API or something. People could be totally happy with what was said here, and vote against it.

In any case, you're technically right. If you think the 15 days announcement is useful, let's do it. But after one year I don't think there is much to discuss in the content of this PDEP. I think it'd be better to understand what the team wants as soon as possible, and have the discussions on the technical details, not in this formalism. In general we've been using common sense over bureacracy, at least with the previous governance, which was very disconnected from reality. But it'll be good to know other's opinion.

Do you want to have the 15 day announcement? Will you update this PDEP with the feedback from the new discussions, or should we just wait the 15 days to be strict with our own policies?

[rhshadrach]

Do you want to have the 15 day announcement?

I do think the announcement should happen, as PDEP-1 calls for, on both GitHub and email, as this is not my decision to make.

[datapythonista]

I was just reading, and the policy also says A PDEP discussion will remain open for up to 60 days.. Not sure what exactly it implies, as it's not mentioned, but technically the PDEP is not under discussion anymore. I surely don't want to do it, but feels like technically this should be closed as rejected or as invalid since it violated the PDEP process in the first place.

I'll send the announcement, but personally, I think the governance should be to make our lives easier. It's not working so well, since this and other PDEPs are being an impediment to decision making, not facilitating it as it was intended. And we should probably put our efforts on updating the process when it's not useful. Just blindly following what is written, just because it's written, doesn't seem the right approach to me. From your comment I don't think you consider the announcement and waiting useful, but you think we should respect the process. It's a valid point (I disagree with), as feels like we'll just waste 15 days for no reason, but no big deal.

Closing here (I'll reopen in 15 days), and will send the announcement.

[Dr-Irv]

Do you want to have the 15 day announcement?

I do think the announcement should happen, as PDEP-1 calls for, on both GitHub and email, as this is not my decision to make.

I do want to point out that here: #58623 (review) , which was on August 27, 2004, I did call for the remaining 15 days of discussion, but never followed up to start the vote.

Nevertheless, things have changed in the 9+ months since, so having another 15 days of discussion is probably a good thing to do.