[Numpy-discussion] Should I use pip install numpy in linux?

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 11:27 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 1:58 PM, Robert McGibbon <rmcgibbo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm not sure if this is the right path for numpy or not,
>
>
> probably not -- AFAICT, the PyPa folks aren't interested in solving teh
> problems we have in the scipy community -- we can tweak around the edges,
> but we wont get there without a commitment to really solve the issues -- and
> if pip did that, it would essentially be conda -- non one wants to
> re-impliment conda.

Well - as the OP was implying, it really should not be too difficult.

We (here in Berkeley) have discussed how to do this for Linux,
including (Nathaniel mainly) what would be sensible for pypi to do, in
terms of platform labels.

Both Anaconda and Canopy build on a base default Linux system so that
the built binaries will work on many Linux systems.

At the moment, Linux wheels have the platform tag of either linux_i686
(32-bit) or linux_x86_64 - example filenames:

numpy-1.9.2-cp27-none-linux_i686.whl
numpy-1.9.2-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl

Obviously these platform tags are rather useless, because they don't
tell you very much about whether this wheel will work on your own
system.

If we started building Linux wheels on a base system like that of
Anaconda or Canopy we might like another platform tag that tells you
that this wheel is compatible with a wide range of systems.   So the
job of negotiating with distutils-sig is trying to find a good name
for this base system - we thought that 'manylinux' was a good one -
and then put in a pull request to pip to recognize 'manylinux' as
compatible when running pip install from a range of Linux systems.

Cheers,

Matthew