[SciPy-user] python crashes on scipy testing

[Travis Oliphant]

rainman wrote:

>Hello scipy-user,
>
>God, that's one thing I hate about Open Source - having to hunt high
>and low for binaries... or to face tremendous nightmares of
>building-from-sources.
>
>Let's see. I'm running WinXP on A-64. I have Python 2.4. Some time ago
>I decided to try SciPy. Aw, hell! No prebuilt binaries for Py2.4.
>And you need a ton of compilers to "make" sources.
>
>But I'm stubborn. I had nerve. I took:
>
>MSYS-1.0.10.exe
>MinGW-3.1.0-1.exe
>atlas3.6.0_WinNT_PIII.zip
>SciPy_complete-0.3.2.tar.gz
>Numeric-23.8.win32-py2.4.exe
>F2PY-2-latest.win32.exe
>
>, then I tuned environment vars and started "setup.py build".
>
>Oh! how cute! they forgot to put wgnuplot.exe inside! Let's take it
>from SciPy_complete-0.3.2.win32-py2.3-num23.5.exe. Trying once more...
>
>Tada! Compilation finally finished without error message.
>Let's run:
>
>import scipy
>scipy.test()
>
>Yeah, a lot of "no test file" messages, dots, some cryptic mumbling
>ending with "zswap:n=3", more dots, WHOOPS! python crashes.
>
>  
>

This is most likely a problem with ATLAS.  The rest of scipy will 
probably work fine.  If you don't need that particular ATLAS routine 
(which in my experience the buggy ATLAS routines are lesser used...) you 
are good to go.

-Travis O.