[Python-Dev] numpy

[Greg Ward]

On 28 April 1999, Mark Hammond said:
> How far do we go :-)
> 
> Personally, I would simply like to see the distutils SIG solve this problem
> for us.  (sure).  Eg, the "build" or "install" process (depending on the
> OS) could build a local HTML file with knowledge many "common" extensions -
> a single click, and it is downloaded, configured and built.   Oh well, back
> to reality...

It's not impossible, it just takes a while.  I think it took the Perl
community about three years to go from "hey! let's have a standard build
mechanism for modules!" to the point where I can install (almost) any
module from CPAN with one shell command:

  perl -MCPAN -e 'install ("MIME::Base64");'

which is insanely cool.  (It took about two minutes to do the above just
now; that included trying two CPAN mirrors that aren't being cooperative
this morning, finding one that was working, downloading the current
module list from it, determining that there is a more recent version
available than the one installed here, downloading it, unpacking it,
running "Makefile.PL" to generate the Makefile, running "make" [which
compiles any extensions in the distribution, copies all the .pm files
around, and generates the documentation], "make test" [run the module's
self-test suite], and "make install" [install it in the "site-perl"
library directory].  Amount of user interaction required: typing the
above command line.)

It's *still* rough around the edges, though, especially when building a
new installation from scratch -- mainly because Perl doesn't ship with
ftp or http libraries, so the CPAN.pm module has to try downloading
stuff with lynx, ncftp, or plain ol' ftp until it has downloaded and
installed the libnet and libwww-perl distributions.  That's one problem
we won't have with Python, at least.  Oh yeah, and it all works *great*
under Unix... but the rest of the world lags behind.

Also, two major components of being able to do this -- the Perl Module
List and CPAN -- are still vapourware in Python-land.  But hey, if we
can get to the "we *have* a standard build mechanism for modules!"
point, then all the rest becomes a lot more feasible.

Pep talk over...

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward at cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives    
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