On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I've gotten a pull request for scikits-sparse to switch it to using numpy.distutils: https://github.com/njsmith/scikits-sparse/pull/2

Overall this seems fair enough, finding libraries is a pain and numpy.distutils has that knowledge.

1) What's the proper way to find lapack using numpy.distutils? The patch tries lapack_mkl_info and lapack_info, but this is 2 of the 6 variants that my numpy.distutils.system_info contains. Really what I probably want is a way to ask numpy how it was built (including any custom paths the user used) and to default to doing the same? Is that possible?

You can get some of that information from the generated numpy.__config__ module (see its show() and get_info() functions). I'm not sure if that includes custom paths that were hacked in by the user by editing the setup.py files, but I think it includes custom paths specified in the site.cfg that the builder used. Of course, if one installed numpy using a binary built on another machine, it is possible for that information to be not applicable to the current build. I believe that you want to use 'lapack_opt' as the most generic optimized LAPACK build information. That should dispatch to the vendor-specific ones if they are present, I think. It's what numpy.linalg and scipy.linalg do. I have rather blissfully forgotten such details, so you may want to do some digging of your own.

2) Is there a better way to build Cython files than this weird monkey-patching thing they propose? (It's still better than the horror that setuptools/distribute require, but I guess I have higher expectations...)

Sadly, probably not. numpy.distutils is not much less horrifying than setuptools. -- Robert Kern