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

[Gael Varoquaux]

On Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 11:11:13AM +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
> > 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  ?


NiPy uses blas/lapack in the C code, and I feel this is not an abnormal
situation: as soon as you starting wanting to do vector operations in C,
you end up needing 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.

OK, so a short term solution might be to have a 'dev' installer that
would ship the lapack libraries used to build numpy (that would address
the size issue), and a long term one, which would be to expose shared
libraries and headers (.so and .dll) to the applications.

Does that sound like a feasible plan? I'd be interested in helping you
work on part 2 of the plan, but I can't spend any time on it before fall
(a set of deadlines...).

Gaël