
On Sep 16, 2013, at 1:54 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav@iki.fi> wrote:
16.09.2013 16:31, William Ray Wing kirjoitti: [clip]
If you will forgive an observation from a Mac user and (amateur) developer. I have twice tried to build Numpy from source and both times failed. The problem was that I couldn't find a single comprehensive set of directions that started from a virgin system (nothing but Apple's python and Xcode) and proceed to working copies of Numpy (and of course Matplotlib).
The problem with OSX is that as a software development platform with open source tools, it is simply immature. You have homebrew, macports, fink, python.org binaries, Apple's own Python installation, proprietary BLAS/LAPACK with its own quirks, unified multiarch binaries, and whatnot in the mix. This makes everything more complicated to support, especially as the situation evolves with time and "recipes" that once worked stop working.
-- Pauli Virtanen
I think I could make a good case that maintaining a recipe is a lot less work than maintaining a binary distribution. Doing the second implicitly requires doing the first anyway. Thanks, Bill