[Distutils] pip on windows experience

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 23 January 2014 23:58, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I really think that's our best near term workaround - still room for
> improvement, but " pip install numpy assumes SSE2" is a much better
> situation than "pip install numpy doesn't work on Windows".

Is it? Do you have any idea what proportion of (the relevant) people
would be using Windows with hardware that doesn't support SSE2? I feel
confident that it's less than 10% but I don't know how to justify a
tighter bound than that.

You need to bear in mind that people currently have a variety of ways
to install numpy on Windows that do work already without limitations
on CPU instruction set. Most numpy users will not get any immediate
benefit from the fact that "it works using pip" rather than "it works
using the .exe installer" (or any of a number of other options). It's
the unfortunate end users and the numpy folks who would have to pick
up the pieces if/when the SSE2 assumption fails.

> Such a change would help a lot of people *right now*, while still leaving
> room to eventually figure out something more sophisticated (like postinstall
> hooks or simpler runtime multi-build support or NumPy changing to a
> dependency that internally makes this decision at runtime).

Postinstall hooks are not that sophisticated and most packaging
systems have them. You're advocating for numpy to take a dodgy
compromise here but can it not be the other way round? Wheel, pip etc.
could quickly agree on and implement a postinstall hook that would
work for numpy and then that could be made more sophisticated later
on.


Oscar