[IPython-dev] iPython binary wheels for OS-X

[Paul Moore]

On 10 December 2013 06:51, MinRK <benjaminrk at gmail.com> wrote:
> By the way on this one, Apple has made this extra complicated: 10.9 ships
> with numpy, scipy, and matplotlib (among other things - setuptools, twisted,
> etc.). It ships these in an Extras directory, which is, as far as `sys.path`
> priority is concerned, part of the stdlib. That means that you will not be
> able to `pip install` any of those packages with System Python on OS X 10.9.
> Or, more precisely, pip will install them, but after the successful install,
> they will never be importable. If you want to install or upgrade numpy,
> scipy, or setuptools on OS X, you must do one (or more) of:
>
> 1. use virtualenv
> 2. use non-System Python
> 3. use easy_install
> 4. use manual setup.py install (with setuptools)
> 5. use `pip install -e`, which *does* appear ahead of stdlib, unlike regular
> `pip install`.
>
> Note that this includes setuptools, so you need to make sure that pip is
> never in charge of updating setuptools, because it will result in *removing*
> importable setuptools, and you will have to start from scratch bootstrapping
> setuptools from ez_setup.py.

Whoops, this sounds pretty significant. Would it be OK if I reposted
it on distutils-sig? I don't think it's something we can fix
particularly easily but it would be worth people being aware of it
(and Nick Coghlan is on distutils-sig, so he might feel it's worth
raising with python-dev for their thoughts)

Paul