[SciPy-dev] Re: ASP: Ipython in SciPy

[Joe Harrington]

Responding to Robert Kern:

I'm using "package" to mean a single, binary installation file, not a
python importation object.

>Since IPython should always be available without scipy (I claim),
>we're always going to have two packages.

That's true of almost the entire contents of SciPy.  Remember that
Windows users have a much harder time installing packages than Linux
people, so fewer packages is much better.  Likewise, not all Linuxes
have YUM or APT.  In the long run, I think we'll have our independent
set of small packages (the core of scipy, Numarray, LAPACK, ATLAS,
Ipython, Chaco and/or matplotlib, Envisage, scipy-doc, the various
application packages, etc. etc.) and one or more "umbrella" packages.
The RPMs and DEBs of the umbrellas may be contentless sets of
dependencies that cause YUM/APT to get the needed packages, but for
Windows they may be actual monolithic files with all the content in
them.  Other platforms will follow one or the other model.

>IPython is not, in its current form, a good library. It will be

For ASP, I only ever talk about the long term since so much is in flux
in the short term (graphics, Numarray/numeric, etc.).  If Ipython
needs to be outside of scipy for a while due to a faster release
schedule, that's fine.  Matplotlib is in the same boat.  I didn't get
the impression from Fernando that this was the case, however.

I think we agree that inside of python it is good to have modularity
visible.  I just want to make it (optionally) invisible in the
installation process.

--jh--