[Numpy-discussion] An idea for future numpy windows installers

Alexander Michael lxander.m at gmail.com
Mon Feb 4 16:19:34 EST 2008


On Feb 4, 2008 5:13 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   While studying a bit nsis (an open source system to build windows
> installers), I realized that it would be good if we could detect the
> target CPU and install the right numpy accordingly. I have coded a
> nsis plugin to detect SSE availability (no SSE vs SSE vs SSE2 vs SS3),
> and including installers within the nsis installer is easy. What would
> people think about including the installers generated with the current
> method (bdist_wininst, I guess ?) for every CPU target, and distribute
> the bundled installer ? The only drawback I can see is the size of the
> installer: in this case, we could have a system which download the
> right installer, but that would be more work, obviously.
>   This seems like an easy, "not too much work required" solution to
> the recurrent problem we get with atlas on windows.

I like the idea of creating such a "universal" Windows installer for the
(optional) numpy dependencies (particularly ATLAS) which is
separate from the numpy distribution. Ultimately, it would be great if
numpy automatically noticed if ATLAS has been installed this way and
self-configured itself to use the libraries when available, but I would still
consider this a better situation if it was easy to build numpy to use
such an installation with numscons. This would also provide a natural
decoupling between the numpy and ATLAS distributions.



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