On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:25 PM, Travis Oliphant <travis@continuum.io> wrote:
On Aug 22, 2012, at 3:59 AM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:51 AM, Travis Oliphant <travis@continuum.io> wrote:
I'm actually not sure, why. I think the issue is making sure that the release manager can actually "build" NumPy without having to buy a particular compiler.
That would help, yes. MS Express doesn't work under Wine last time I checked by the way.
However, the issue is more than just one license. There's a large number of packages that depend on numpy and provide binaries. If they can't make those compatible with numpy ones, that's a problem. Users will first install numpy 64-bit, and then later find out that part of the scientific Python stack isn't available to them anymore.
As far as I understand, you don't *have* to build all downstream dependencies with the same compiler that NumPy was built with unless your extension relies on the way C-functions pass structures on the stack (not pointers to them, but structures as a whole) or if it relies on the representation of FILE*. At one time all structures were passed as pointers specifically for this reason. The FILE* situation is a problem, but most extensions don't use NumPy C-API calls that have a FILE* argument.
It is much more pervasive than that, unfortunately. And for fortran, it is much worse, because if we build scipy or numpy with Intel Fortran, I think we pretty much force everyone to use intel fortran for *any* binary on top of them. David