[SciPy-user] bdist_rpm build error in scipy_core from CVS

[Stephen Walton]

Hello, Fernando,

Fernando Perez wrote:

> OK, many thanks for tracking this down.  I have a more generic 
> question though, now that you're familiar with my approach: do you 
> agree with it?  What I concluded was that the RPM 'arch' flags were 
> not sufficient to address the needs of something like ATLAS,

This approach works for me.  I was not aware of the $YUM<N> flags, and 
agree that it does neatly solve the whole problem.  I take it, by the 
way, that you use a kickstart file to get the whole process rolling when 
you build a new system?  I'd like to see that, probably off list.

I would only add a couple of minor suggestions about your pybrpminst 
script, realizing this is something like a personal taste.  My overall 
goal is to only do those things as root which must be done as root;  in 
particular "setup.py bdist_rpm" should be done as an ordinary user.  See 
footnote below.  Thus, I'm changing my local copy of pybrpmdist to have 
an 'sudo' in front of the lines which touch the depot.  I'm also 
deleting the 'yum install' from my copy, preferring to rely on my 
automatic nightly yum updates to do this for me.

One comment/caveat:  even ATLAS's naming convention may be a bit coarse 
grained.  I've built ATLAS on my laptop (Athlon M CPU) and an Athlon 
desktop.  ATLAS correctly sees that the cache sizes are different and 
builds accordingly, even though both architectures end up called 
ATHLONSSE1.  Clint Whaley (ATLAS author) designed ATLAS for maximum 
performance, and wrote it on the assumption you would always tune it for 
each machine you're on.

Stephen

P.S.  A true story showing why it is important not to build as root.  
The first version of the C compiler which HP shipped with HP-UX 10.20 
had an interesting bug:  it attempted an unlink of /dev/null.  Of 
course, this succeeded if you ran cc as root and then your system 
mysteriously locked up.