[SciPy-User] Install scikits.timeseries error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat'

[Matt Knox]

Nancy Lee <nancy.leelee <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> Hi,
> I am very new with Python and sikits.timeseries package. I tired to install
> scikits.timeseries-0.91.3.tar.gz, I unzip it and use
> 'python setup.py install ' command. However, it shows error msg as
>  
> 'No module named msvccompiler in numpy.distutils; trying from
> distutilscustomize MSVCCompilercustomize MSVCCompiler using build_extbuilding
> 'scikits.timeseries.cseries' extensioncompiling C sourceserror: Unable to
> find vcvarsall.bat'
>  
> My OS is win 32 and the scikits.timeseries-0.91.3.win32-py2.6.exe file works
> fine for me , but for some specifit reason, I need to use the setup.py to
> install the package. Could anyone pls help me? Thanks!
>  
> Nancy

The time series module includes extensions written in C which require that
you have a compiler installed to build them. If you are using the official
python 2.6 release from python.org, and the official pre-compiled numpy
releases from sourceforge, then it *should* work with either visual studio
2008 (including the express edition), or mingw. Personally, I have been using
TDM's mingw releases from here: http://www.tdragon.net/recentgcc/ and it works
fine for me. I believe if you are using the activestate python distribution, it
won't work out of the box with mingw, you'd have to use Visual studio for that.

Note that by default, setup.py will try to compile with a microsoft compiler
on windows, you need to configure python to use mingw instead if you want to do
that. I think there is a command line argument you can pass to setup.py to make
it use mingw, but I just create a "distutils.cfg" file. Just create a text file
with the following two lines in it:

[build]
compiler = mingw32


Then save it as "C:\Python26\Lib\distutils\distutils.cfg".

- Matt