[Numpy-discussion] binary wheels for numpy?

[Chris Barker]

Hi folks.,

I did a little "intro to scipy" session as part of a larger Python class
the other day, and was dismayed to find that "pip install numpy" still
dosn't work on Windows.

Thanks mostly to Matthew Brett's work, the whole scipy stack is
pip-installable on OS-X, it would be really nice if we had that for Windows.

And no, saying "you should go get Python(x,y) or Anaconda, or Canopy,
or...) is really not a good solution. That is indeed the way to go if
someone is primarily focusing on computational programming, but if you have
a web developer, or someone new to Python for general use, they really
should be able to just grab numpy and play around with it a bit without
having to start all over again.


My solution was to point folks to Chris Gohlke's site -- which is a
Fabulous resource --

THANK YOU CHRISTOPH!

But I still think that we should have the basic scipy stack on PyPi as
Windows Wheels...

IIRC, the last run through on this discussion got stuck on the "what
hardware should it support" -- wheels do not allow a selection at install
time, so we'd have to decide what instruction set to support, and just
stick with that. Which would mean that:

some folks would get a numpy/scipy that would run a bit slower than it might
and
some folks would get one that wouldn't run at all on their machine.

But I don't see any reason that we can't find a compromise here -- do a
build that supports most machines, and be done with it. Even now, people
have to go get (one way or another) a MKL-based build to get optimum
performance anyway -- so if we pick an instruction set support by, say (an
arbitrary, and impossible to determine) 95% of machines out there -- we're
good to go.

I take it there are licensing issues that prevent us from putting Chris'
Binaries up on PyPi?

But are there technical issues I'm forgetting here, or do we just need to
come to a consensus as to hardware version to support and do it?

-Chris







-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
NOAA/NOS/OR&R            (206) 526-6959   voice
7600 Sand Point Way NE   (206) 526-6329   fax
Seattle, WA  98115       (206) 526-6317   main reception

Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20150515/081908ac/attachment.html>