Travis Oliphant <oliphant@ee.byu.edu> writes:
2) Installation problems -- I'm not completely clear on what the "installation problems" really are. I hear people talk about them, but Pearu has made significant strides to improve installation, so I'm not sure what precise issues remain. Yes, installing ATLAS can be a pain, but scipy doesn't require it. Yes, fortran support can be a pain, but if you use g77 then it isn't a big deal. The reality, though, is that there is this perception of installation trouble and it must be based on something. Let's find out what it is. Please speak up users of the world!!!!
While I am not a scientific user, I occasionally have a need for something like stats, linear algebra, or other such functions. I'm happy to install something (I'm using Python on Windows, so when I say "install", I mean "download and run a binary installer") but I'm a casual user, so I am not going to go to too much trouble. First problem - no scipy Windows binaries for Python 2.4. I'm not going to downgrade my Python installation for the sake of scipy. Even assuming there were such binaries, I can't tell from the installer page whether I need to have Numeric, or is it included. Assuming I need to install it, the binaries say Numeric 23.5, with 23.1 available. But the latest Numeric is 23.8, and only 23.8 and 23.7 have Python 2.4 compatible Windows binaries. Stuck again. As for the PIII/P4SSE2 binaries, I don't know which of those I'd need, but that's OK, I'd go for "Generic", on the basis that speed isn't relevant to me... There's no way on Windows that I'd even consider building scipy from source - my need for it simply isn't sufficient to justify the cost. As I say, this is from someone who is clearly not in the target audience of scipy, but maybe it is of use... Paul. -- A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation -- Saki