[Numpy-discussion] Instructions on building from source

[Andrew Straw]

Robert Kern wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 16:56, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> I was just trying to explain to a new user how to build numpy from
>> source on ubuntu and I realized that there's not much info on this
>> front in the source tree.  Scipy has a nice INSTALL.txt that even
>> lists the names of the debian/ubuntu packages needed for the build
>> (which can be a useful guide on other distros).  Should we have a
>> stripped-down copy of this doc somewhere in the top-level directory of
>> numpy?
> 

Just for reference, you can find the build dependencies of any Debian
source package by looking at its .dsc file. For numpy, that can be found
at http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-numpy

Currently (version 1.1.0, debian version 1:1.1.0-3), that list is:

Build-Depends: cdbs (>= 0.4.43), python-all-dev, python-all-dbg,
python-central (>= 0.6), gfortran (>= 4:4.2), libblas-dev [!arm !m68k],
liblapack-dev [!arm !m68k], debhelper (>= 5.0.38), patchutils,
python-docutils, libfftw3-dev

Build-Conflicts: atlas3-base-dev, libatlas-3dnow-dev, libatlas-base-dev,
libatlas-headers, libatlas-sse-dev, libatlas-sse2-dev

Some of that stuff (cdbs, debhelper, patchutils) is specific to the
Debian build process and wouldn't be necessary for simply compiling
numpy itself.

And on a Debian (derivative) system, you can stall those with "apt-get
build-dep python-numpy". This will only install the build dependencies
for the version of python-numpy which is listed in your apt
sources.list, but 99% of the time, that should be sufficient.

-Andrew