[SciPy-dev] Re: Scipy-dev Digest, Vol 22, Issue 8

[Greg Novak]

>> With things like Enthon out there that act as the "batteries included
>> super distribution" anyway.  It makes me wonder if we shouldn't move
>> scipy to the "scipy-modules" perspective directly and develop and
>> think about scipy has a collection of modules that work together
>> smoothly (i.e. naming conventions, etc.)

Everyone agrees that Scipy should be easy to install, so I'm sure that 
whatever happens, installation will at least continue to get easier.

However, I would like to point out that (at least as far as I can see) 
Enthon is Windows only, so (IMO) it shouldn't be advanced as a possible 
solution for users who want all the extras.  At least not until (if) it's 
available on more platforms.

I recently suffered a hard disk crash, and I can say that getting Scipy 
reinstalled was quite nerve racking for me, in spite of long experience 
with software installations in general.  My problems surrounded undefined 
symbols in Fortran code.  Granted, the situation is made worse by the 
simultaneous switch to GCC 4.0 that most major distributions seem to be 
making at the same time.

In any case, the problems were severe enough that I switched from Fedora 
to Debian because there were pre-packaged Scipy binaries, so I could 
finally start using the code that I'd written once more.

Cheers,
Greg