[Numpy-discussion] Remove bento from numpy

[Ralf Gommers]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On 5 Jul 2014 09:23, "Ralf Gommers" <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 10:13 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Charles R Harris <
> charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Ralf likes the speed of bento, but it is not currently maintained
> >>
> >>
> >> What exactly is not maintained ?
> >
> >
> > The issue is that Julian made some slightly nontrivial changes to
> core/setup.py and didn't want to update core/bscript. No one else has taken
> the time either to make those changes. That didn't bother me enough yet to
> go fix it, because they're all optional features and using Bento builds
> works just fine at the moment (and is part of the Travis CI test runs, so
> it'll keep working).
>
> Perhaps a compromise would be to declare it officially unsupported and
> remove it from Travis CI, while leaving the files in place to be used on an
> at-your-own-risk basis? As long as it's in Travis, the default is that
> anyone who breaks it has to fix it. If it's not in Travis, then the default
> is that the people (person?) who use bento are responsible for keeping it
> working for their needs.
>
-1 that just means that simple changes like adding a new extension will not
get made before PRs get merged, and bento support will be in a broken state
much more often.

> > I don't think the above is a good reason to remove Bento support. The
> much faster builds alone are a good reason to keep it. And the assertion
> that all numpy devs understand numpy.distutils is more than a little
> questionable:)
>
> They surely don't. But thousands of people use setup.py, and one or two
> use bento.
>
I'm getting a little tired of these assertions. It's clear that David and I
use it. A cursory search on Github reveals that Stefan, Fabian, Jonas and
@aksarkar do (or did) as well:
   https://github.com/scipy/scipy/commit/74d823b3
   https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/2993
   https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/3606
   https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/3889
For every user you can measure there's usually a number of users that you
don't hear about.

> Yet supporting both requires twice as much energy and attention as
> supporting just one.
>
That's of course not true. For most changes the differences in where and
how to update the build systems are small. Only for unusual changes like
Julian patches to make use of optional GCC features, Bento and distutils
may require very different changes.

> We've probably spent more person-hours talking about this, documenting the
> missing bscript bits, etc. than you've saved on those fast builds.
>
Then maybe stop talking about it:)

Besides the fast builds, which is only one example of why I like Bento
better, there's also the fundamental question of what we do with build
tools in the long term. It's clear that distutils is a dead end. All the
PEPs related to packaging move in the direction of supporting tools like
Bento better. If in the future we need significant new features in our
build tool, Bento is a much better base to build on than numpy.distutils.
It's unfortunate that at the moment there's no one that works on improving
our build situation, but that is what it is. Removing Bento support is a
step in the wrong direction imho.

Ralf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20140705/decbfb16/attachment.html>