[AstroPy] Importing packages across distributions?

[Christoph Deil]

Hi,

I've run into a similar problem … I wanted to install astropy into the Python that comes with the
Chandra [1] and Fermi [2] analysis tools to be able to use astropy and their tools from the same script.
[1] http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/index.html
[2] http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/data/analysis/software/

Sometimes it is possible to make this work, but most of the time (at least on Mac) the astropy build fails.
The problem is that these analysis packages are basically impossible to build from source (at least on Mac),
so one has to get the binary distribution and then some incompatibility with the compiler or other libraries
on the user machine occurs when trying to build astropy.

I guess there's nothing that can be done to improve this situation from the astropy side,
except maybe share hacks how to make it work?
Or if someone knows people maintaining those big astro analysis packages that come with their
own Python to ask them to test if building astropy works with their Python on common platforms?

Christoph

On May 6, 2013, at 11:28 PM, Thomas Robitaille <thomas.robitaille at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Eric,
> 
> CASA uses it's own Python installation, which is separate from
> Anaconda and other distributions. While it's possible to mess with
> PYTHONPATH to make CASA and other Python distributions see the same
> packages, it's kind of a hack. Instead, the easiest way (in my
> opinion) to install Python packages into CASA is to use the script
> I've written and made available here:
> 
> https://github.com/astrofrog/casa-python
> 
> In fact, the README shows you how to install Astropy into CASA.
> 
> Let me know if you have any trouble installing it.
> 
> Cheers,
> Tom
> 
> 
> On 6 May 2013 23:22, Eric L. N. Jensen <ejensen1 at swarthmore.edu> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> First, thanks for your answers to my previous question about an easy-to-install python distribution - I ended up installing anaconda.
>> 
>> My next question is most likely a pretty elementary bit of python, but I haven't succeeded in finding a discussion of it: to what extent are packages installed under one distribution's tree importable by another distribution?  I had thought/hoped that after installing anaconda (with its rich collection of auxiliary packages) that I might be able to do the following within CASA (with has its own python installation):
>> 
>>   sys.path.append('/Users/ejensen1/anaconda')
>> 
>>   from astropy import coordinates as coord
>> 
>> but that fails with "No module named astropy".    The situation is similar if I can start up the Mac OS system-distributed python, so it's not just a CASA thing.
>> 
>> So my specific question is whether this sort of thing is ever possible (simply importing a module from somewhere else in a directory tree), and more generally where to find some documentation / discussion of this issue - all the discussions I've found so far (probably not searching on the right words) imply that importing modules is simply a matter of setting the path correctly, but it's clearly more complicated than that.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Eric
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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