[SciPy-user] x86_64 build notes.

[tom fogal]

Sorry for more of this, you're probably all sick of it but I wanted to
make sure it got into the archives for others running into the same
issue.

Building BLAS/LAPACK/ATLAS

This is almost exactly the same as the 'building atlas for scipy' guide
says. The only modification is that you need to add -fPIC to all of
your build flags. This is simple enough for BLAS and LAPACK (edit
make.inc for LAPACK -- note even NOOPT needs to have the -fPIC flag!),
but for ATLAS you must use xconfig. The guide already has you set
fortran flags; make sure to add -fPIC to them. You also need to define
the flags for the C compiler with '-F c "-fPIC -fwhatever_you_want"' and
I also set the flags for 'MCC', whatever that is: '-F m "-fPIC
-fwhatever"'. Otherwise build as normal.

Building SciPy

SciPy 0.3 does not build with just a simple 'python setup.py build'.
The magic command line you are looking for is:

python setup.py build build_ext "-lpython2.3 -shared"

You might be able to replace python2.3 with 2.2 or similar, I haven't
tried and don't intend to. I imagine when 2.4 comes out, that you would
want to change it to -lpython2.4, etc...

You will see many warnings, but it appears to build alright. 'python
setup.py install' works fine.

Testing

Here is where I've run into issues. I'm getting some test failures
and errors. 'import scipy' works without problems, but scipy.test() has
some issues. I get a lot of:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'eig'

I've yet to do any development with SciPy but the tests seem to at
least finish, if not work, so hopefully it will work well enough for
my needs...

Hope this helps someone else trying to build SciPy in this environment.

-tom