[SciPy-user] New scipy release before 8/20?

[Stefan van der Walt]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 11:33:01AM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
> Building and distributing binaries is really hard work (and not that 
> grateful :) ). The thing you want is automatic and repeatable builds, 
> which means having the possibility to get a specified environment at 
> will.

Albert reminded me that we could potentially tweak the buildbot to do
this packaging.  There are, however, two issues.

First, the buildbot currently only supports numpy.  Compiling multiple
projects (residing in different repositories) with buildbot isn't
straightforward, but with a bit of hacking it should be possible (the
source is Python, how hard can it be ;).

Second, those machines all have different configurations of ATLAS,
MKL, etc.

> Call me crazy, but I think the best thing to distribute binaries would 
> be the ability to do cross compilation; unfortunately, cross compilation 
> for python is not easy at all. I intend to take a look at GUB 
> (http://lilypond.org/~janneke/bzr/gub.darcs/) which is used by lilypond 
> to compile binaries for many platforms, including mac os X, windows, 
> linux and FreeBSD.

Another option is to build the packages under vmware.  If you can
obtain a licensed copy of windows somewhere, there are instructions on
the internet on how to create a vmware image.  Vmplayer is a free
download.

Regards
Stéfan