Type Pirating Distances.jl

[willtebbutt]

I would be fine with adding it for now, but maybe let's open an issue so we don't forget it and fix it in case the upstream response is negative or the upstream changes take too long.

Originally posted by @devmotion in https://github.com/_render_node/MDI0OlB1bGxSZXF1ZXN0UmV2aWV3Q29tbWVudDQxNTEzODc4OA==/comments/review_comment

[st--]

It's not clear (to someone not familiar with the original context) what this is about, and the link does not seem to work for me, would it be sensible to clarify this issue a bit ?

[willtebbutt]

This was originally about whether or not we added some functionality to Distances that we needed inside this package or do things properly (I think it was probably something like implementing pairwise(::SqEuclidean, ::AbstractVector) or something that hadn't been implemented in Distances).

In the end, we opted to just roll our own functions that default to calling Distances.jl's functions, but gives us the flexibility to add the functionality we need.

@theogf @devmotion is this a fair summary? I'm a bit on the details because it all happened a while ago.

[devmotion]

I think that's it pretty much. It seems this issue could be closed? IIRC there are some other open issues related to metric such as e.g. fixing the name to something more appropriate such as binary_op but this specific issue seems to be resolved by using Distances only as fallback.

[willtebbutt]

Agreed. I'll close. Anyone should re-open if they feel there's more to be discussed.