[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[Ralf Gommers]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 9:54 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 7:25 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Skipper Seabold <jsseabold at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
>
> >> I like the idea of trying to emulate something like R's install.package
> >> (eventually). This, to me, is one of the reasons it's so successful. The
> >> target audience, as I think it is for pylab, is users - people that are
> >> proficient at writing scripts and generally smart problem solvers but
> not
> >> necessarily extremely great programmers. For example, I don't think
> there's
> >> an assumption that the average R user has working knowledge of how to
> build
> >> a package from scratch. Developers, on the other hand, don't need too
> much
> >> hand holding to get the other tools they need - e.g., compilers, sphinx
> >> probably falls in here, etc. If having things like distribute in the
> package
> >> helps move us in this direction (would it?), then I think that's a good
> >> argument for including it.
> >
> >
> > Before something like a robust "install.package" is a reality, I'm not
> sure
> > requiring setuptools/distribute/pip/... is useful. It breaks all the
> time,
> > which will give new users a poor impression of Pylab (or Python).
> > Python(x,y)'s solution of plugins as .exe files is much less likely to
> break
> > if done right.
>
> It works great for plugins that they've put together and distributed
> and are up to date with the version you need and etc., but there are
> >24,000 packages on PyPI. IME pip failures come down to:
>  - packages that use numpy.distutils but numpy isn't installed
>  - packages that need a compiler
>
 - packages that have some elaborate library dependencies (like
> suitesparse or whatever)
> The first two are easily solved.


I thought we're first talking about the non-compiler-basic-pylab. So item 2
isn't solved. Add to your list "I work in a company, and yes they have a
firewall, and no I don't have admin rights".

Ralf

And if that only gives people access
> to 22,000 packages or so, then oh well... I can't see how it would be
> better to have *no* library installation method.
>
> I think every project I've used R on I've ended up wanting to upgrade
> some package at some point. E.g. if I want pandas 0.8 and I'm using
> Python(x,y), then 'pip' will probably just work, and it's currently
> the *only* option (they're still distributing 0.7, but they do include
> a compiler).
>
> (Okay, I admit that part of this is just that I want to stop twitching
> every time I see a tutorial that includes the phrase "sudo python
> setup.py...".)
>
> -n
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-User mailing list
> SciPy-User at scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-user
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-user/attachments/20120921/1a8c2cd9/attachment.html>