Thanks a lot for your contributions. I really appreciate your work!

This is a breaking API change, we must consider how to handle this best. See #14545 (review) and following.

Ideas how to handle this the least painful way for users are very welcome (even though an index change will likely be a hard break one way or the other).

BTW: Are you planning on adding more changes to Table? If so, we might consider a complete rewrite, which might be easier to transition from an API compatibility point of view.

Thanks, trust me it is not fun digging into the 15 year old code I wrote ;)

All these recent table related pull requests involve some degree of table breakage.

Re: am I planning on adding more changes to the table. I am leaning towards the suggestion of creating a separate mpltable project, which would give a lot more freedom to break things.

It also gives a place to document the API differences which should help people move to the new table.

Once I have a working package then we could consider fixing matplotlib to do something like:

try:
from mpltable import table
# display warning that we are using mpltable?
except:
from . import table

Then anyone who wants to try the new table just has to install the mpltable package, if it breaks the fix is easy to: uninstall mpltable.

If we decide to go this route I think I would just close the existing pull requests and point people to the new package.

Going with a clean separate apprach sounds reasonable to me. I think I would not import it to the exact name though. Can make for a lot of surprises on the user side; and is more difficult to cleanly deprecate, migrate and phase out. Going to think a bit more about a good way for that.

Overall this is a larger-scale API decision and @tacaswell should be involved. He also has some ideas how external packages could be integrated.

This is fixed in my blume project, which provides a fixed up table widget with a number of other enhancements:

https://github.com/swfiua/blume/

On PyPi as blume.

Closing as too much of an API change. Since there are several issues around tables, a new separate table class is the way forward. Currently, this is realized in https://github.com/swfiua/blume.

@swfiua please report back in case you think this PR is still of value.