[SciPy-user] [ANN] numscons 0.5.1: building scipy

[David Cournapeau]

Hi,

    Mumscons 0.5.1 is available through pypi (eggs and tarballs). This 
is the first version which can build the whole scipy source tree. To 
build scipy with numscons, you should first get the code in the branch:

svn co http://svn.scipy.org/svn/scipy/branches/build_with_scons

And then build it like numpy:

python setupscons.py install

Technically speaking, you can build scipy with numscons above a numpy 
build the standard way, but that's not a good idea (because of potential 
libraries and compilers mismatches between distutils and numscons). See 
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/wiki/NumScons for more details.

The only tested platform for now are:
     - linux + gcc; other compilers on linux should work as well.
     - solaris + sunstudio with sunperf.

On both those platforms, only a few tests do not pass. I don't expect 
windows or mac OS X to work yet, but I can not test those platforms ATM. 
I am releasing the current state of numscons because I won't have much 
time to work on numscons the next few weeks unfortunately.

PLEASE DO NOT USE IT FOR PRODUCTION USE ! There are still some serious 
issues:
    - I painfully discovered that at least g77 is extremely sensitive to 
different orders of linker flags (can cause crashes). I don't have any 
problem anymore on my workstation (Ubuntu 32 bits, atlas + gcc/g77), but 
this needs more testing.
    - there are some race conditions with f2py which I do not fully 
understand yet, and which prevents parallel build to work (so do not use 
the scons command --jobs option)
    - optimization flags of proprietary compilers: they are a PITA. They 
often break IEEE conformance in quite a hard way, and this causes 
crashes or wrong results (for example, the -fast option of sun compilers 
breaks the argsort function of numpy).

So again, this is really just a release for people to test things if 
they want, but nothing else.

cheers,

David