[Numpy-discussion] Why are all fortran compilers looked for when --fcompiler=something is given ?

[David Cournapeau]

Hi,

    While building numpy in wine, I got some errors in distutils when
initializing the fortran compilers. I build numpy with:

wine python setup.py build -c mingw32 --fcompiler=gnu95

And I got an error in load_all_fcompiler_classes when it tries to load
the Compaq visual compiler. I don't think it has anything to do with
wine, but rather that in python 2.6, running MSVCCompiler().initialize()
can raise an IOError (python 2.6 uses a new method to lookd for msvc
compilers, based on the existence of a bat file, which I don't have on
my wine installation; I can check this on Windows, but that would be
ackward since I would need to uninstall visual studio first...). I could
catch the exception in the CompaqVisualCompiler, but I don't understand
why this class is loaded at all. It also explains a warning I never
quite understand before about "one should fix me in fcompiler/compaq.py"
on windows whereas I have never used this compiler.

Is this something we should "fix" ? Or just let alone to avoid breaking
anything ?

cheers,

David