Getting Scipy's weave to work reliably on Windows
Hi, While testing Scipy's weave on several different Windows installations, I came across some problems with spaces in paths that often prevent weave from working. I can see a change that could probably get weave working on most Windows installations, but it is a quick hack. Someone knowledgeable about distutils (and numpy.distutils?) might be able to help me fix this properly. Below I describe three common problems with weave on Windows, in the hope that this information helps others, or allows someone to suggest how to fix the spaces-in- paths problem properly. I think there are three common problems that stop weave from working on Windows. The first is not having a C compiler. Both Python(x,y) and EPD provide a C compiler that seems to work fine, which is great! The second problem is that if weave is installed to a location with a space in the path, linking fails. There is already a scipy bug report about this (http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/809). I've just commented on that report, saying the problem appears to be with distutils, and there is already a Python bug report about it (http://bugs.python.org/issue4508). Maybe someone could close this scipy bug, or link it to the Python one somehow? In any case, when using Python(x,y) or EPD, this bug will not show up if the default installation locations are accepted. So, that's also good news! The third problem is that if the Windows user name has a space in it (which in my experience is quite common), compilation fails. Weave uses the user name to create a path for its "intermediate" and "compiled" files. When the compilation command is issued, the path with the space in it is also not quoted. Presumably that is another error in distutils (or numpy.distutils)? Unfortunately I wasn't able to pinpoint what function is failing to quote strings properly, because I couldn't figure out the chain that leads to the compiler being called. However, I can avoid the problem by removing spaces from the user name in weave itself (catalog.py): def whoami(): """return a string identifying the user.""" return (os.environ.get("USER") or os.environ.get("USERNAME") or "unknown").replace(" ","") (where I have added .replace(" ","") to the existing code). I realize this isn't the right solution, so if someone could help to guide me to the point where quoting should occur, that would be very helpful. Otherwise, is there any chance of applying a hack like this so weave can work reliably on Windows? Thanks, Chris
Hi Chris, Have you tried patching python's distutils with the patch at ( http://bugs.python.org/issue4508)? If so, does the patch fix both cases of spaces in the path? It appears to me that one of the compiler files in the python source is not correctly quoting of spaces in intermediate files. Cheers, Brian On 18 July 2010 03:49, Chris Ball <ceball@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
While testing Scipy's weave on several different Windows installations, I came across some problems with spaces in paths that often prevent weave from working. I can see a change that could probably get weave working on most Windows installations, but it is a quick hack. Someone knowledgeable about distutils (and numpy.distutils?) might be able to help me fix this properly. Below I describe three common problems with weave on Windows, in the hope that this information helps others, or allows someone to suggest how to fix the spaces-in- paths problem properly.
I think there are three common problems that stop weave from working on Windows. The first is not having a C compiler. Both Python(x,y) and EPD provide a C compiler that seems to work fine, which is great!
The second problem is that if weave is installed to a location with a space in the path, linking fails. There is already a scipy bug report about this (http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/ticket/809). I've just commented on that report, saying the problem appears to be with distutils, and there is already a Python bug report about it (http://bugs.python.org/issue4508). Maybe someone could close this scipy bug, or link it to the Python one somehow? In any case, when using Python(x,y) or EPD, this bug will not show up if the default installation locations are accepted. So, that's also good news!
The third problem is that if the Windows user name has a space in it (which in my experience is quite common), compilation fails. Weave uses the user name to create a path for its "intermediate" and "compiled" files. When the compilation command is issued, the path with the space in it is also not quoted. Presumably that is another error in distutils (or numpy.distutils)? Unfortunately I wasn't able to pinpoint what function is failing to quote strings properly, because I couldn't figure out the chain that leads to the compiler being called. However, I can avoid the problem by removing spaces from the user name in weave itself (catalog.py):
def whoami(): """return a string identifying the user.""" return (os.environ.get("USER") or os.environ.get("USERNAME") or "unknown").replace(" ","")
(where I have added .replace(" ","") to the existing code).
I realize this isn't the right solution, so if someone could help to guide me to the point where quoting should occur, that would be very helpful. Otherwise, is there any chance of applying a hack like this so weave can work reliably on Windows?
Thanks, Chris
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Chris Ball