[Numpy-discussion] Blas / lapack / binary installers...

[David Cournapeau]

Hi Matthew,

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 4:44 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Summary: is it possible to distribute, optionally or not, the blas /
> lapack libraries that numpy is built against, with the numpy binary
> installers?

Yes, it is possible.

> We at the NIPY project have run into what seems like a recurring
> problem; we want to build our code against both numpy and lapack, on
> windows, linux and OS X.
>
> No problem of course if we've done a development install - we already
> needed to have blas/lapack.

I am not sure I understand: why do you need blas/lapack to build
projects ? Does NiPY itself uses blas/lapack  ?

> Proposal
> -------------
> Make the binary installers for windows with the option to put the
> blas/lapack libraries in some predictable location and adapt the
> site.cfg file accordingly.

It is possible, but it would make the installers quite big. As Gael
said, a more general solution would be to use .so (well, dll), put
them in a known location, so that applications can reuse it. That's
something which would be great for a lot of reasons, but that's
difficult to do on windows + distutils.

cheers,

David