[SciPy-dev] swig dependency

[David Cournapeau]

Robert Kern wrote:
> Jarrod Millman wrote:
>   
>> On 10/4/07, Christopher Hanley <chanley at stsci.edu> wrote:
>>     
>>> I see that the latest revision of scipy (r3410) now has a swig
>>> dependency.  What version of swig is now required?  I am unable to build
>>> scipy with swig version 1.1 (Patch 5).
>>>       
>> SciPy has required SWIG for at least a year. 
>>     
>
> That's not entirely true. The UMFPACK bindings are optional, and sparsetools has
> the generated files checked in so that no one except those modifying those
> wrappers needs to have SWIG installed. Checking generated files into source
> control is somewhat icky, but so is having to answer this question over and over.
>   
Something which may be nice, but I don't know if it is feasable, would 
be to regularly test whether the files can be regenerated. For example, 
when I wanted to improve scipy.cluster, I could not make swig work at 
all, and I ended up rewriting the whole thing in plain C (the module was 
really small). I am afraid that if generated code stays for a long time 
without being regularly updated, nobody will be able to work on it anymore.

David