On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Sandro Tosi <matrixhasu@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

On Sat, May 5, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Ralf Gommers
<ralf.gommers@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first release candidate of
> NumPy 1.6.2.  This is a maintenance release. Due to the delay of the NumPy
> 1.7.0, this release contains far more fixes than a regular NumPy bugfix
> release.  It also includes a number of documentation and build improvements.
>
> Sources and binary installers can be found at
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/NumPy/1.6.2rc1/
>
> Please test this release and report any issues on the numpy-discussion
> mailing list.

...

> BLD:   add support for the new X11 directory structure on Ubuntu & co.

We've just discovered that this fix is not enough. Actually the new
directories are due to the "multi-arch" feature of Debian systems,
that allows to install libraries from other (foreign) architectures
than the one the machine is (the classic example, i386 libraries on a
amd64 host).

the fix included to look up in additional directories is currently
only for X11, while for example Debian has fftw3 that's
multi-arch-ified and thus will fail to be detected.

Could this fix be extended to include all other things that are
checked? for reference the bug in Debian is [1]; there was also a
patch[2] in previous versions, that was using gcc to get the
multi-arch paths - you might use as a reference, or to implement
something debian-systems-specific.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=640940
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/python-modules/packages/numpy/trunk/debian/patches/50_search-multiarch-paths.patch?view=markup&pathrev=21168

It would be awesome is such support would end up in 1.6.2 .

Hardcoding some more paths to check in distutils/system_info.py should be OK, also for 1.6.2 (will require a new RC).

The --print-multiarch thing looks very questionable. As far as I can tell, it's a Debian specific gcc patch, only available in gcc 4.6 and up. Ubuntu before 11.10 release also doesn't have it. Therefore I don't think use of --print-multiarch is appropriate for numpy for now, and certainly not a change I'd like to make to distutils right before a release.

If anyone with access to a Debian/Ubuntu system could come up with a patch which adds the right paths to system_info.py, that would be great.