[SciPy-User] Scipy stack: standard packages (poll)

[David Baddeley]

I'd personally make it the lowest common denominator of Python(xy), Anaconda, EPD-full (rather than free - I think free has too little to be useful and we're not mandating that any particular scipy-stack implementation ought to be free - but that's probably somewhat contentious), Sage etc.  As far as linux distros go I'd consider the Debian/Ubuntu repositories (as being the most comprehensive linux distros) but would stop short of requiring packages to be available on RH or other linuxes. If you mandate pip / easy-install you could probably have the metapackage easy-install anything that wasn't available in the distro. Any linux worth it's salt should be build- capable. To ease installation of my python-microscopy package I wrote an Ubuntu based install script for a 'scipy-stack' like environment which does this. It can be seen at http://code.google.com/p/python-microscopy/source/browse/PYME/install_dependencies.py

Even though it's been dismissed as 'too hard' I still think there is a strong case for specifying Scipy-stack to include a compiler - EPD manages to do this well on both x32 and x64 using mingw so it's definitely technically possible. More importantly, retro-fitting mingw & msys to an existing distro can be quite painful (the last time I tried I needed to edit the source of distutils to make it invoke mingw by default before it would work in complex build situations or with easy-install etc). In my opinion the omission of a compiler stops the distribution from being easily extendible if the user wants to experiment with other packages (or mandates that someone maintain a scipy-multiverse with compiled versions of all the possible packages and writes a suitable search and install interface).  I'd love to be able to specify the 'Scipy stack' as a broader alternative to EPD for people installing my packages under windows, but without build capability it's
 not going to happen.

cheers,
David


________________________________
 From: Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com>
To: SciPy Users List <scipy-user at scipy.org> 
Sent: Friday, 5 October 2012 1:19 AM
Subject: Re: [SciPy-User] Scipy stack: standard packages (poll)
 
On 4 October 2012 13:07, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> This suggests another possible way of coming up with the base package
> list... if a package is already included in all of
>   Python(x,y), EPD, Anaconda, Debian, Redhat, <whatever other relevant
> distros I'm missing>

The the question becomes one of which distros are relevant. If we
count EPD Free, for example, only nose (of the packages in the poll)
is common to all the distributions at present.

For Linux distributions, it's trickier: I have a wealth of packages
available from the Ubuntu repositories, but they're mostly not
installed by default - I'm not sure if even numpy is in a default
installation. The intention is to make a metapackage called something
like scipy-stack, which will pull in all the relevant packages. But
for now, there's no set of packages you can assume will be installed
together.

Thomas
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