[SciPy-dev] building binary installers

[David Cournapeau]

Stéfan van der Walt wrote:
> That way, you can build on your
> private box, and if someone else needs to take over the
> responsibility, you just give them the VM image.

Well, you have to be careful here: you are not supposed to just give a
VM with windows inside like this without violating the license.

>>
>>
>> Is there a pain-free method to produce installers for these platforms?
>>  Are there any machines available for testing and creating binaries on
>> the various platforms?

On windows, you can use the build_msi/build_wininst command of
distutils, but this will only produce a binary for your package: users
will need to install both numpy and scipy first. On Windows, you have
the problem of blas/lapack: if you don't need much, I would strongly
encourage you to use netlib blas/lapack only, and to not bother with
atlas. There is also the problem of not mixing g77/gfortran, like on
Linux. For windows 64, you can't use mingw, including the fortran
compiler...

On Mac OS X, the build_mpkg does the same as build_wininst on windows,
with the same restrictions. You don't have to bother about
blas/lapack/co, because Mac OS X includes an optimized one in the
system, making the dependency problem much easier to deal with than on
windows. You need a mac to build those, but I guess you already knew that :)

cheers,

David