[Tutor] Pygraphics crashed

eryksun eryksun at gmail.com
Fri May 17 18:04:50 CEST 2013


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Oscar Benjamin
<oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The wheel format will solve part of the problem in that it will make
> it safer and easier to install prebuilt binaries. It will still
> require someone to create all of the prebuilt binaries for each
> OS/architecture/Python version and it doesn't really make this step
> any easier than creating e.g. an MSI installer is now.

I haven't played around with this myself, but the reference
implementation of Wheel can convert eggs and exes (wininst):

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel/0.16.0

Currently in a virtual environment you have to use easy_install for
binary egg/exe installers. It'll be nice to just pip install
everything.

> Since my own Windows machine has the wrong version of Visual Studio
> (and out IT policy won't let me change it) I use mingw. However, every
> time I install a new Python I have to patch distutils to fix the
> '-mnocygwin' bug that prevents current Python from working with it.
> Why this issue (http://bugs.python.org/issue12641) is still unresolved
> despite being fully understood two years ago I don't understand.

Can you use the Windows SDK compiler?

It took a long time for that issue to get a patch up.  I pretty much
agree with Éric's take on the matter, i.e. "more feedback, bug
reports, patches and reviews from the community would help" and
"testing the patches on your system would help".

> My own suggestion to coworkers who are new to Python and using Windows
> or OSX (without macports) is to use either the Enthought Python
> Distribution (free for academic use) or Python(x, y) (free for
> anyone). These will install and setup the bulk of packages commonly
> used in scientific work from a single installer. Either distribution
> will install and setup numpy, scipy, PIL, mingw, pip, distribute, and
> many more hard to build packages.
>
> See here for the lists of what each distribution includes:
> https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/package-index/
> https://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/wiki/Welcome

I've used Python(x,y) and will doubly recommend it if you want a
hassle-free setup for scientific/engineering analysis. There's also
ActivePython, which has the PyPM package manager, though many packages
are only available to their paying customers.


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