[Numpy-discussion] binary builds against older numpys

[David Cournapeau]

Stéfan van der Walt wrote:
> Hi John
>
> 2009/5/20  <josef.pktd at gmail.com>:
>   
>> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 3:07 PM, John Hunter <jdh2358 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> We are trying to build and test mpl installers for python2.4, 2.5 and
>>> 2.6.  What we are finding is that if we build mpl against a more
>>> recent numpy than the installed numpy on a test machine, the import of
>>> mpl extension modules which depend on numpy trigger a segfault.
>>>       
>
> I think we accidentally forgot to increase the API version at some
> stage (bad), but we now have checks in place to catch these
> mismatches.
>   

Yes, we did forget this, but it would not have solve the problem.
Building against a version N of numpy and running under a version M < N
is not supported at all. We explicitly check for it starting for numpy
1.4.0, but it does not affect the solution, that is building against the
oldest version possible. This rule is the same for almost any library,
and not specific to numpy, or even python extensions.

David