[Numpy-discussion] RPMs out of date, have problems

[Konrad Hinsen]

Joe Harrington <jh at oobleck.astro.cornell.edu> writes:

> The latest Numeric release on the web site is 20.3.  The latest with
> an RPM is 20.1, and that RPM has a problem: it creates a directory in
> the system root directory.  Paul D. says he will implement a solution
> but doesn't have the experience with RPMs (or the time) to find the
> problem quickly.  I haven't dealt with building Python packages or

If someone can give a precise description of the problem, I'll look at
it, I think I have done enough RPMs to find my way... The RPMs
generated by Distutils are often good enough, but sometimes need some
manual cleanup.

> distutils (is distutils a separate thing or part of Python?) at all.

It is a part of Python since Python 1.6.

> installation manager.  We need these (very) early adopters, so I think
> that having a current Numeric RPM for i386 Linux (and the equivalent

I agree in principle, but providing Linux binary RPMs is becoming more
and more messy: it depends on the Python version and on the
distribution, sometimes even the distribution version number. That's a
lot of RPMs. Source RPMs are easier, with some care they should work
everywhere, but installation requires a compiler plus some of the
"-devel" packages that not everyone has.

> Also, it would be more consistent with the RPM naming scheme to call
> the RPM "python-Numeric" (or "python-numeric", or even "numpy") rather
> than just "Numeric".  If that's hard or philosophically undesirable,

Agreed.

Konrad.
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