[SciPy-dev] the scipy mission, include finite element solver

[Andrew Straw]

Robert Kern wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 17:39, Andrew Straw <strawman at astraw.com> wrote:
>> Ondrej Certik wrote:
>>
>>> So it's clear that besides scipy itself, there should be a all in one
>>> solution, like EPD (commercial), Sage (GPL), or SPD (GPL, but in
>>> principle if all the Sage scripts are rewritten, could be BSD) that I
>>> am working on.
>>>
>>> There needs to be something, that people can take and customize to
>>> create their own all in one solutions, e.g. for PDE, or for biology,
>>> for mathematics (that is Sage) or I don't know what.
>> I call that Debian/Ubuntu. Package management is one thing that Debian
>> got really right. I don't really see the value in re-inventing Debian
>> package management. Why not just use it?
> 
> If you can really restrict your deployments just to a single
> distribution of a single OS, great. Many of us are not in that
> position.

Well, fink ports the Debian package management to Mac OS X. Does
something equivalent exist for Windows? The actual Debian file formats
are pretty simple, so it seems like it should be do-able.

The no root issue is another setback for my suggestion. I guess porting
the Debian package management isn't going to help there...

Maybe what is needed is an entirely unprivileged-user Debian-inspired
distribution and package management system that doesn't bother
installing the low-level system stuff (e.g. the kernel, X11/Windows
GUI/Mac OS X GUI) but will keep a copy of everything from libpng, to
cairo, to ATLAS, to numpy/scipy/etc in the user's area. This sounds like
a generally useful thing, and not one that is specific to Python.
Perhaps such a project could actually take off.

-Andrew