[Numpy-discussion] numpy docs dependency problem in Ubuntu

Benjamin Root ben.root at ou.edu
Fri Feb 11 10:56:41 EST 2011


On Friday, February 11, 2011, Jouni K. Seppänen <jks at iki.fi> wrote:
> [Crossposting to matplotlib devel list]
>
> Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:22, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Here's the problem: for Ubuntu, we've had to disable the building of
>>> the numpy documentation package, because its dependencies violate
>>> Ubuntu policy.  Numpy is in our "main" archive but the documentation
>>> depends on python-matplotlib, which lives in our "universe"
>>> archive.  Such cross archive dependencies break the build.
>>>
>>> We can't put python-matplotlib in main because of *its* dependencies.
>>
>> As a digression, I think the python-matplotlib dependencies could be
>> significantly reduced. For a number of use cases (this is one of them,
>> but there are others), you don't need any GUI backend. Independent of
>> this issue, it would be great to be able to install python-matplotlib
>> in a headless server environment without pulling in all of those GUI
>> bits. Looking at the list of the hard dependencies, I don't understand
>> why half of them are there.
>>
>>   http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/python/python-matplotlib
>
> Would it make sense to split out each interactive backend to its own
> Ubuntu package, e.g. python-matplotlib-tk, etc? Each of these would
> depend on the relevant toolkit packages, and python-matplotlib would
> have a much shorter list of dependencies.
>
> --
> Jouni K. Seppänen
> http://www.iki.fi/jks
>
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> NumPy-Discussion at scipy.org
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>

There are a lot of advantages to this idea, and I wonder if it might
make distributions easier and allow fuller control by the user.  In
particular, kubuntu could default to using the qt backend while
regular ubuntu could use gym.

However, how practical is this to implement?  What does it require
from us upstream?

Ben Root



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