[Numpy-discussion] Binary releases

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> New summary
>
> 32 bit windows, python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, compiled with MSVC
> 64 bit windows, python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, compiled with MSVC, linked with
> MKL
>
> These should be good for both windows 7 and window 8.
>
> For Mac there is first the question of OS X versions, (10.5?), 10.6, 10.7,
> 10.8. If 10.5 is omitted, packages built on 10.6 should be good for 10.7 and
> 10.8, so
>
> OS X 10.6  python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, compiled with native compiler, linked
> with Accelerate.
>
> The main question seems to be distribution and coordination with scipy. I
> was thinking we would link in MKL statically, which I think should be OK.
> Christoph does that and it should decouple Numpy from Scipy. It may not be
> the most efficient way to do things, but it would work. My impression is
> that if we wanted to distribute a dynamic library then every user would need
> an MKL license to use it.
>
> It would be good to get this settled soon as we can't afford to futz around
> with this forever waiting to release Numpy 1.8 and Scipy 0.13.

Why not just release numpy 1.8 with the old and terrible system? As
you know I'm 110% in favor of getting rid of it, but 1.8 is ready to
go and 1.9 is coming soon enough, and the old and terrible system does
work right now, today. None of the other options have this property.

As you know, parallelization is the key to performance, and reducing
serial data dependencies is the key to parallelization ;-).

-n