A key thing to remember here is that each user has their particular set of "small things" that are all they need from scipy -- put us all together, and you have SciPy -- that's what it is for.
As a user, I suggest that this becomes a reasonable goal when up to date SciPy installers are maintained for all target platforms.
All it takes is someone to do it. Also, there was talk of "modularizing" scipy so that it would be easy to install only those bits you need -- in particular, the non-Fortran stuff should be trivial to build.
Macs are increasingly popular among my students
It can be a pain to build this kind of thing on OS-X, as Apple has not supported a Fortran compiler yet, but it can (and has) been done. IN fact, the Mac is a great target for pre-built binaries as there is only a small variety of hardware to support, and Apple supplies LAPACK/BLAS libs with the system. As for distributing it, the archive at: pythonmac.org/packages takes submissions from anyone -- just send a note to the pythonmac list -- that list is a great help in figuring out how to build stuff too. -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov