[SciPy-dev] The future of SciPy and its development infrastructure

[Robert Kern]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 15:22, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I've only just subscribed to this list (after following on GMANE-RSS)
> because I wanted to contribute to the discussion.  I'd like to echo
> Perry's first point below, and add on some specific concerns I have
> about the entire workflow discussion.
>
> An aspect I worry is being overlooked is that in some communities
> change comes rather slowly.  I have helped out a number of people with
> user-space deployment of Python packages, and the biggest impediment
> is -- as with many things -- installation.  I worry that if the
> release schedule of SciPy doesn't speed up substantially, accessing
> source control will be the primary means of getting the code.
> Installing git and mercurial (and maybe Bazaar, but I've had the most
> trouble with that) into some user-space area is not difficult, but it
> adds on another layer of overhead.  Until all of the supercomputing
> centers provide DVCS, users (and developers!) targeting deployment
> there will have yet another barrier to entry for using SciPy.  (And as
> a result, they may fall back on old habits: IDL, for instance.)  To
> that end, I'd like to strongly and plaintively request that some kind
> of mirror in SVN, or even archived nightly tarballs, be kept of the
> primary tree of development.

Pretty much all of the DVCS web frontends allow users to get tarballs
of any revision they like. For example, the "bz2", "zip" and "gz"
links at the top of my Mercurial repo for line_profiler:

http://www.enthought.com/~rkern/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/line_profiler/

Click the "files" link for any of the previous revisions to go back in
the history, and click on the "bz2", etc., links to get past
revisions.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco