SEGFAULT from importing _minpack.so (was Re: [SciPy-user] install

[Gerard Vermeulen]

On Friday 24 May 2002 00:00, you wrote:
> > PS: how fundamental is Atlas to SciPy? Installing ATLAS is a big
> > obstacle for most users. Could it be possible to make ATLAS optional?
> > I have still a few old machines (150-300 MHz) and hate the prospect
> > of installing Atlas on
> > those.
>
> I agree.  SciPy is starting to mature enough where non-geeks should be able
> to install it.  ATLAS is definitely the biggest hurdle.  We could
> distribute the SciPy tarballs with f2py rolled in so that Python and
> Numeric were the only dependencies (and we *could* roll Numeric in to get
> rid of it as a dependency, but it made some unhappy in the SciPy-0.1
> release).  This assumes people have a lapack and blas on their system (is
> this standard)?
>
I do not like Numeric in SciPy. I had made my own SciPy-0.1 RPM with
the numeric part removed (except for fastumath). Mandrake provides RPMs
for Numeric and some other packages depend on it. You do less harm
to their slick RPM system if you do not include Numeric.

LAPACK/BLAS packages are provided by Mandrake, SuSE & probably others.

>
> There are several solutions to the ATLAS issue:
>
>     1. Supply ATLAS binaries for the common platforms.
>     2. Make the setup.py script work with the
>        standard lapack and blas impelementation.
>
I think (2) is good enough.

Gerard