On Mar 9, 2005, at 8:32, Travis Oliphant wrote:
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!!!!
One more comment on this: Ease of installation depends a lot on the technical expertise of the people doing it. If you see SciPy as a package aimed at computational scientists and engineers, then you can indeed expect them to be able to handle some difficulties (though that doesn't mean that thery are willing to if the quantity of trouble is too high). But for me, scientific Python packages are not only modules used by me in my own scripts, but also building blocks in the assembly of end-user applications aimed at non-experts in computation. For example, my DomainFinder tool (http://dirac.cnrs-orleans.fr/DomainFinder), is used mostly by structural biologists. Most people in that community don't even know that a compiler is, so how can I expect them to install g77? Konrad. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Konrad Hinsen Laboratoire Léon Brillouin, CEA Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France Tel.: +33-1 69 08 79 25 Fax: +33-1 69 08 82 61 E-Mail: khinsen@cea.fr ---------------------------------------------------------------------