PEP 450 Adding a statistics module to Python

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 10 August 2013 12:50, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> In article <mailman.417.1376104455.1251.python-list at python.org>,
>  Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> Given that installing numpy or scipy is generally no more difficult
>> that executing "pip install (scipy|numpy)" I'm not really feeling the
>> need for a battery here...
>
> I just tried installing numpy in a fresh virtualenv on an Ubuntu Precise
> box.  I ran "pip install numpy".  It took 1.5 minutes.  It printed
> almost 1800 lines of build crap, including 383 warnings and 83 errors.
> For a newbie, that can be pretty intimidating.
>
> That's for the case where I've already installed numpy elsewhere on that
> box, so I already had the fortran compiler, and the rest of the build
> chain.  For fun, I just spun up a new Ubuntu Precise instance in AWS.
> It came pre-installed with Python 2.7.3.  I tried "pip install numpy",
> which told me that pip was not installed.
>
> At least it told me what I needed to do to get pip installed.
> Unfortunately, I didn't read the message carefully enough and typed
> "sudo apt-get install pip", which of course got me another error because
> the correct name of the package is python-pip.  Doing "sudo apt-get
> install python-pip" finally got me to the point where I could start to
> install numpy.
>
> Of course, if I didn't have sudo privs on the box (most corporate
> environments), I never would have gotten that far.
>
> At this point, "sudo pip install numpy" got me a bunch of errors
> culminating in "RuntimeError: Broken toolchain: cannot link a simple C
> program", and no indication of how to get any further.

You should use apt-get for numpy/scipy on Ubuntu. Although
unfortunately IIRC this doesn't work as well as it should since Ubuntu
doesn't install the appropriate BLAS/LAPACK libraries by default
(leaving you with numpy's fallback libraries).

On Windows you should use the MSI installer (or easy_install).
Hopefully numpy/scipy will start distributing wheels soon and pip
install numpy will actually work.


Oscar