On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Arnd Baecker wrote:

Hi,

while tracking down a problem with scipy on the latest quantian 0.4.9.4 (based on Knoppix) we came across the following:

A) weave dependency of scipy/xplt/Mplot.py

In scipy/xplt/Mplot.py the function _getdir() uses weave to get a directory that the user has write access to.

So commenting out the line weave = ppimport('weave'); _level_docs(weave) in scipy/__init__.py is not enough to remove any dependency on weave. Would it be possible to write a _getdir() which does not make use of weave ?

A quick look at the xplt code makes also me to wonder whether weave dependency is necessary there but I am not familiar with xplt details. Travis?

Presumably this is not that critical, but in the quantian case python2.3-dev was not installed which contains distutils.

This brings me to my second question:

B) It seems that without distutils an `import weave` fails. Are distutils really necessary to _use_ weave ? (At least for scipy itself distutils seems only necessary to run scipy.test())

I think the answer is yes. For one reason, do grep distutils *.py */*.py in weave/ directory ;) Pearu