[Numpy-discussion] Segmentation Fault with Numeric 24.2 on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (8.7.0)

[Daran L. Rife]

Hi Chris,

Thanks very much for your reply. My apology for the confusion.
To be clear, I am a veteran user of Numeric not numpy. I tried
installing four versions of Numeric: 23.8, 24.0, 24.1, and 24.2.
My Python distro is built from source, using the GCC 4.0.1 suite
of compilers. I am running all of this on a Mac G5 PowerPC with
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (8.7.0). All branches of Numeric 24.x cause a
"Segmentation Fault". The scripts I was running this against are
a bit complex, so it is not so easy for me to sort out when/where
the failure occurs. I'll keep doing some testing and see if I can
get a better idea for what seems to be the issue.

I'd very like much like to move to numpy, but I have code that
needs to be working -now-, so at this point I am more interested
in Numeric; I am an adept user of Numeric, and I know it works well
on Debian Linux boxes.

I will try your suggestion of installing and running the pre-built
packages at <http://www.pythonmac.org/packages/py24-fat/>.

Thanks again for your patience and for your help.


Daran

--

> Daran L. Rife wrote:
>> Many thanks for the reply. This was my first attempt
>> to build and use numpy;
> 
> "numpy" used to be a generic name for the Numerical extensions to
> Python. Now there are three versions:
> 
> "Numeric": The original, now at version 24.2 This is probably the last
> version that will be produced.
> 
> "numarray": This was designed to be the "next generation" array package.
> It has some nice additional features that Numeric does not have, but is
> missing some as well. It is at version 1.5.1. it may see some bug fix
> releases in the future, but probably won't see any more major development.
> 
> "numpy": this is the "grand unification" array package. It is based on
> the Numeric code base, and is designed to have the best features of
> Numeric and numarray, plus some extra good stuff. It is now at version
> 1.0beta, with an expected release date for 1.0final sometime this fall.
> It is under active development, the API is pretty stable now, and it
> appears to have the consensus of the numerical python community as the
> "way of the future"
> 
> I wrote all that out so that you can be clear which package you are
> having trouble with -- you've used both the term "Numeric" and "numpy"
> in your posts, and there is some confusion.
> 
> If you are working on a project that does not need to be released for a
> few months (i.e. after numpy has reached 1.0 final), I'd use numpy,
> rather than Numeric or numarray.
> 
> Also: on OS-X, there are far to many ways to build Python. When you
> report a problem, you need to define exactly which python build you are
> using, and this goes beyond python version -- fink? darwinports?
> built-it-from-source? Framework? Universal, etc...
> 
> The MacPython community is doing it's best to standardize on the
> Universal Build of 2.4.3 that you can find here:
> 
> http://www.pythonmac.org/packages/py24-fat/
> 
> There you will also find pre-built packages for Numeric24.2,
> numarray1.5.1, and numpy0.9.8
> 
> Have you tried any of those? They should be built against Apple's
> vectLib. There isn't a package for numpy 1.0beta there yet. I may add
> one soon.
> 
>> Interestingly, I can get Numeric version 23.8 to build and
>> run just fine, but it appears that the dotblas (BLAS
>> optimized matrixmultiply/dot/innerproduct) does not properly
>> get built in. Thus, all my matrix operations are -very- slow.
> 
> I'm not sure of the dates, but that is probably a version that didn't
> have the check for Apple's vecLib in the setup.py, so it built with the
> built-in lapack-lite instead. You can compare the setup.py files from
> that and newer versions to see how to make it build against vectLib, but
> I suspect if you do that, you'll see the same problems.
> 
> Also, please send a small test script that crashes for you, so others
> can test it.
> 
> -Chris