belinda thom wrote:
Eric,
Thanks for the well-thought-out answers to some of my recent posts.
I've been using:
http://pythonmac.org/packages/py24-fat/index.html
for installing scipy, numpy, and matplotlib, as I didn't feel as confident installing things manually.
Should I be using svn instead? (Is that what most users do?) And if so, is there a two-minute tutorial on what I'd need to do to get that stuff running on my machine? (The code I end up using needs to be stable enough for classroom use).
Belinda, I think the great majority of mpl, numpy, and scipy users install from packages, not from svn or tarballs. I am in the minority. I use linux (presently Ubuntu Edgy, previously Mandriva), and in general installation from svn and tarballs is easy with linux for all three of these packages. There is an initial learning curve when one has to get the right libraries and devel packages installed, but once that is done then subsequent updates from svn are not a problem at all. I do not use Windows or OSX so I do not have personal experience, but based on what I have seen on the mailing lists it seems pretty clear that building from source--any source--on either of these platforms is much more daunting, and very few people do it. As far as I know, your pythonmac package source is a good choice. I'm sure one of the many Mac users on this list can elaborate. Eric