[Numpy-discussion] How many build systems do we need?

[Charles R Harris]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 5:34 AM, Charles R Harris
> <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > In the continuing proposal for cleanups, note that we currently support
> > three (3!) build systems, distutils, scons, and bento. That's a bit much
> to
> > maintain when contemplating changes, and scons and bento both have
> external
> > dependencies. Can we dispense with any of these? Thoughts?
>
> I think it's actually 6 build systems, because each build system
> supports two modes: compiling each source file separately before
> linking, and concatenating everything into one big file and compiling
> that.
>
> It's been proposed that we phase out the one-file build (which is
> currently the default):
>   http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2012-June/063015.html
>   https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/315
> The separate compilation approach is superior in every way, so long as
> it works. There is a theory that on some system somewhere there might
> be a broken compiler/linker which make it not work[1], but we don't
> actually know of any such system.
>
> Shall we switch the default to separate compilation for 1.8 and see if
> anyone notices?
>
>
+1


> -n
>
> [1] The problem is that we need to make sure that symbols defined in
> numpy .c files are visible to other numpy .c files, but not to
> non-numpy code linked into the same process; this is a problem that
> the C standard didn't consider, so it requires system-specific
> fiddling. However that fiddling is pretty standard these days.
>

And do we really care? I've compiled and statically linked libraries using
setup.py because it is more easily portable than make, and on windows few
symbols are exposed by default while on linux most are, but who looks?
Exposing unneeded symbols is  a bit of a wart but I don't think it matters
that much for most things.

Chuck
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