[Numpy-discussion] Problems building numpy

[Robin Ince]

Hi,

Thanks for the responses.

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:37:52 -0700, "Christopher Barker"
<Chris.Barker at noaa.gov> said:
> CygWin is NOT the same as MinGW. They both are gcc, but IIUC, cygwin
> builds against the cygwin unix-like standard libs, and MinGW builds
> against the system libs -- so only MinGW can link with a Python build
> with MSVC.

Cygwin has mingw packages which provide the MinGW libs, so that it
effectively provides a MinGW install that can be used outside of Cygwin.
Since Cygwin is required to build lapack and atlas (for make etc.) it
doesn't make much sense to install MinGW seperately on its own. Anyway,
the compiler is definitely working with Python because I successfully
built the PyCrypto extension as a test.

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:52:35 +0200, "Matthieu Brucher"
<matthieu.brucher at gmail.com> said:
> What version of MSVC are you using ?
>
> If you really want to have an optimized version, don't use mingw (gcc
> is not up to date).

I'm not using MSVC - I was trying to build it with Cygwin/MinGW since it
said on the Wiki that is what is best supported.

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:06:35 -0400, "Benjamin M. Schwartz"
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> said:
> Far and away the easiest solution is to install Gentoo Linux.  All you
> need to do under gentoo is to add the "lapack" useflag and then
> "emerge numpy". Gentoo will automatically install ATLAS/LAPACK by
> default, compiled according to your settings, and then compile NumPy
> to use that LAPACK.

I managed to successfully build everything on Linux without too much
trouble. I guess what I'm trying to do on Windows isn't really possible
at the moment - there seem to be some serious issues with distutils. As
I mentioned, I can't get it to pick up any path settings from site.cfg,
there is the bug with new_fcompiler returning None when a Compiler type
is expected, it doesn't recognise the Cygwin/MinGW Fortran compiler, it
appears to give the wrong linking flags for gcc from MinGW and also
sometimes gives errors that MSVC is required, which is not true with
Python 2.5.

It seems most people building on Windows use MSVC, so I guess that is
what I would try next, but for the time being I think I will try the
coLinux suggestion. I was worried about matplotlib graphics over an X
connection, but I guess there are other options like VNC etc.

Perhaps the windows install section wiki could/should be updated to
reflect the fact it's not currently possible to do this. Might save
someone else some time!

As for my unrelated question, I was still wondering if anyone has any
information about the relative merits of MKL vs ATLAS etc.

Thanks,

Robin