[Numpy-discussion] distributing wheels & SSE/superpack options

[Christoph Gohlke]

On 12/6/2013 12:40 PM, David Cournapeau wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Christoph Gohlke <cgohlke at uci.edu
> <mailto:cgohlke at uci.edu>> wrote:
>
>     On 12/6/2013 10:06 AM, Ralf Gommers wrote:
>     > Hi all,
>     >
>     > There are a few discussions on packaging for the scientific Python stack
>     > ongoing, on the NumFOCUS and distutils lists:
>     >https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/numfocus/mVNakFqfpZg
>     <https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/numfocus/mVNakFqfpZg>
>     > <https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/numfocus/mVNakFqfpZg>
>     >https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/numfocus/HUcwXTM_jNY
>     <https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/numfocus/HUcwXTM_jNY>
>     > <https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/numfocus/HUcwXTM_jNY>
>     >http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.distutils.devel/20202
>     >http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.distutils.devel/20296
>     >
>     > One of the things that we should start doing for numpy is distribute
>     > releases as wheels. On OS X at least this is quite simple, so I propose
>     > to just experiment with it. I can create some to try out and put them on
>     > a separate folder on SourceForge. If that works they can be put on PyPi.
>     >
>     > For Windows things are less simple, because the wheel format doesn't
>     > handle the multiple builds (no SSE, SSE2, SSE3) that are in the
>     > superpack installers. A problem is that we don't really know how many
>     > users still have old CPUs that don't support SSE3. The impact for those
>     > users is high, numpy will install but crash (see
>     >https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/1697). Questions:
>     > 1. does anyone have a good idea to obtain statistics?
>     > 2. in the absence of statistics, can we do an experiment by putting one
>     > wheel up on PyPi which contains SSE3 instructions, for python 3.3 I
>     > propose, and seeing for how many (if any) users this goes wrong?
>     >
>     > Ralf
>     >
>     > P.S. related question: did anyone check whether the recently merged
>     > NPY_HAVE_SSE2_INTRINSIC puts SSE2 instructions into the no-SSE binary?
>     >
>     >
>
>     Has anyone succeeded building wheels for numpy, scipy, and matplotlib?
>
>
> I did for numpy and scipy. You had to hack a bit numpy.distutils to make
> it work for scipy,but nothing that would be too complicated to really fix.
>
> In your case, the trick is to use the setupegg file: python setupegg.py
> bdist_wheel
>
> David
>

Thank you. The setupegg.py trick worked. Could the numpy.distutils hack 
be applied to the numpy 1.8.x and master branches? I'll try to fix the 
matplotlib issue.

Christoph