[SciPy-dev] Re: [Numpy-discussion] Trying out Numeric3

[Pearu Peterson]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon wrote:

> Pearu Peterson wrote:
>> I got an impression from earlier threads that scipy_distutils will be 
>> included to scipy_base. So, I am proposing to use scipy_distutils tools and 
>> our scipy experience for dealing with this issue, scipy.lib.lapack
>> would be a good working prototype here.
>
> Have you tried integrating scipy_distutils with Python's distutils? My guess 
> is that Python's distutils can benefit from what is in scipy_distutils, 
> particularly the parts dealing with C compilers. A clean integration will 
> also prevent duplicated code, avoids Pearu having to keep scipy_distutils up 
> to date with Python's distutils, and will enlarge the number of potential 
> users. Having two distutils packages seems to be too much of a good thing.

No, I have not. Though a year or so ago there was a discussion about this 
in distutils list, mainly for adding Fortran compiler support to 
distutils. At the time I didn't have resources to push scipy_distutils 
features to distutils and even less so for now. So, one can think that 
scipy_distutils is an extension to distutils, though it also includes
few bug fixes for older distutils.

On the other hand, since Scipy supports Python starting at 2.2 then it 
cannot relay much on new features added to distutils of later Python 
versions. Instead, if these features happen to be useful for Scipy then 
they are backported for Python 2.2 through implementing them in 
scipy_distutils. "Luckily", there are not much such features as 
scipy_distutils has evolved with new very useful features much quicker 
than distutils.

But, for Numeric3, scipy.distutils would be a perfect place to clean up 
scipy_distutils a bit, e.g. removing some obsolete features and assuming 
that Numeric3 will support Python 2.3 and up. Based on that, integrating 
scipy_distutils features to standard distutils can be made less pain if 
someone decides to do that.

Pearu