[SciPy-user] import scipy seg faults

[Pearu Peterson]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Hartley, Ed wrote:

> the problems I'm having are:
> built CVS scipy against Numeric 20.2.0 and got 
> Numeric cannot import rank 
> error message
> imported Numeric then scipy imported OK ran the scipy.test() Ok
> 
> So figured that the version of Numeric I was working with put MA etc in 
> site-packages not site-packages/Numeric 
> so got CVS version of Numeric placed in Numerical underneath scipy tree 
> rebuilt Numeric 
> rebuilt scipy
> ran python imported scipy and got a segmentation fault.
> 
> I have since repeated install of both Numeric and SciPy with the
> install --force option with the same result. and repeated above with
> non CVS versions of Numeric.
> 
> So which versions of Numeric are known to work with the current CVS of
> SciPy and what is needed to get a clean build of SciPy

Numeric 20.3 or newer.

Many people have experienced segmentation faults when they have 
switched/updated Numeric version. The reason seems to be that when
installing Numeric, its header files are not updated (due to distutils,  
I guess), and since the header files are not binary compatible between
major versions, curious segmentation faults will occur. 
A throughout clean up and rebuilding all Numeric related extension
modules from scratch often fixes such segmentation faults.  If it doesn't,
then either the clean up wasn't complete enough or there are other causes
for these segmentation faults.
In either case, to localize the source of the problem, one should try to
import scipy extension modules separately. Also, make sure that newly
installed Numeric and its packages are working properly.

Pearu