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

[Chris Barker]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 2:38 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I think there's a distinction between 'promote numpy as wheels' and
> 'make numpy available as a wheel'.  I don't think you'll see much
> evidence of "promotion" here - it's not really the open-source way.
>

Depends on how you define "promotion" I suppose. But I think that
supporting something is indeed promoting it.

I've been a fan of getting the scipy stack available from pip for a long
time -- I think it could be really useful for lots of folks not doing heavy
scipy-style work, but folks are very wary of introducing a new, hard to
install, dependency.

But now I'm not so sure -- the trick is what you tell newbies. When I teach
Python (not scipy), I start folks off with the python.org python. Then they
can pip install ipython, which is the only part of the "scipy stack" I want
them to have if they are not doing real numerical work.

But what if they are? Now it's pretty clear to me that anyone interested in
getting into data analysis, etc with python should just stating off with
Anaconda (or Canopy) -- or maybe Gohlke's binaries for Windows users. But
what if we have wheels on all platforms for the scipy stack (and a few
others?). Now they can learn python, pip install numpy, scipy, etc, learn
some more, get excited -- delve into some domain-specific work,and WHAM --
hit the wall of installation nightmares. NOW, they need to switch to
Anaconda or Canopy...

I think it's too bad to get that far into it and then have to switch and
learn something new.  -- Again, is there really a point to a 90% solution?

So this is the point -- heading down this road takes us to a place where
people can get much farther before hitting the wall -- but hot the wall
they will, so we'll still need other solutions, so maybe it would be better
for us to put our energies into those other solutions.

By the way, I'm seeing more and more folks that are not scipy-focused
starting off with conda, even for web apps.


> I'm not quite sure what you mean about 'circling the wagons', but the
> general approach of staying on course and seeing how things shake out
> seems to me entirely sensible.
>

well, what I've observed in the PyPa community may not be circling the
wagons, but it has been a "we're not ever going to solve the scipy
problems" attitude. I'm pretty convinced that pip/wheel will never be even
a 90% solution without some modifications -- so why go there?

Indeed, it's not uncommon for folks on the distutils list to say "go use
conda" in response to issues that pip does not address well.

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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