[Numpy-discussion] numpy docs dependency problem in Ubuntu

Benjamin Root ben.root at ou.edu
Fri Feb 11 10:59:35 EST 2011


On Friday, February 11, 2011, Benjamin Root <ben.root at ou.edu> wrote:
> 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
>> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
>>
>
> 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.

stupid autocorrect... Gym -> Gtk

Ben Root

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



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