[Numpy-discussion] Re: Summer of Code 2006

[Albert Strasheim]

Hello all

> -----Original Message-----
> From: numpy-discussion-admin at lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:numpy-
> discussion-admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Robert Kern
> Sent: 15 April 2006 07:20
> To: numpy-discussion at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Numpy-discussion] Re: Summer of Code 2006
> 
> Albert Strasheim wrote:
> > Hello all
> >
> > The Google Summer of Code site for 2006 is up:
> >
> > http://code.google.com/soc/
> >
> > Maybe the NumPy team can propose a few projects to be funded by this
> > program. Personally, I'd be interested in working on the build system,
> > especially on Windows, and/or extending the test suite.
> 
> What work do you think needs to be done on the build system? (I'm not
> contending the point; I'm just curious.)

Let me start by saying that the build system works fine for what I think is
the default case, i.e. building NumPy on Linux with preinstalled LAPACK and
BLAS. However, as soon as you vary any of those parameters, things get
interesting.

I've spent the past couple of days trying to build NumPy on Windows with
ATLAS and CLAPACK with MinGW and Visual Studio .NET 2003 and VS 8. I don't
know if it's just me, but this seems to be very hard. This could probably be
partly attributed to the build systems of these libraries and to the lack of
documentation, but I've also run into problems with NumPy build scripts.

For example, the inclusion of the gcc library in the list of libraries when
building Fortran code with MinGW causes the build to break. Also, building
FLAPACK from source causes the build to fail (too many open files).

While these errors on their own aren't particularly serious, I think it
would be helpful to set up an automated system to check that builds of the
various configurations NumPy supports can actually be done. There are
probably a few million ways to build NumPy, but it would be nice if we could
make sure that the N most common configurations always work, and provide
documentation for "trying this at home."

I also think it would be useful to set up a system that performs regular
builds of the latest revision from the SVN repository. I think anyone
attempting this is going to run into a few issues with the build scripts,
especially when trying to build on multiple platforms.

Things I would like to get right, which I think are much harder than they
need to be (feel free to disagree):

- Windows builds in general
- Visual Studio .NET 2003 builds
- Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 builds
- Visual Studio 2005 builds
- Builds with ATLAS and CLAPACK

The reason I'm interested in the Microsoft compilers is that they have many
features to help us make sure that the code is correct, both at compile time
and at run time.

Any comments? Anybody building on Windows that finds the process to be
completely painless?

Regards,

Albert