[SciPy-dev] old web site front page

[Travis Oliphant]

Perry Greenfield wrote:

>On Dec 22, 2005, at 10:06 AM, Joe Harrington wrote:
>  
>
>I'll second Joe on this issue. My sense is the ususal denizens of 
>scipy, being comparatively sophisticated (despite proclamations to the 
>contrary :-) in doing installations, are not aware of how an important 
>issue this is. I have had many people come to me and say they tried 
>scipy before and that they gave up trying to install it. When I tell 
>them that numarray is being replaced with scipy the usual reaction is 
>of great worry because of the installation issue (I try my best to 
>convince them that the core will be as easy to install and so forth). 
>You won't hear from most of these people if they try and fail. They 
>will just give up and associate bad things with the project. For that 
>reason I think it is important not to oversell scipy_core to the 
>general community until it has been beaten on for a while, 
>installation-wise and shown to be a pretty easy install, and 
>comparatively stable (seeing weekly updates will scare them quite a bit 
>too).
>  
>
We really need to separate scipy_core from full scipy.  The lists are 
full of "install" problems that are mostly "full scipy" problems or 
problems related to confusion regarding the packages that exist.  I 
think their should be plenty of advertisment for scipy_core.  The flux 
in scipy_core right now is the naming scheme.  This should settle down 
in a matter of weeks.

I agree that *a lot* of patience is in order for full scipy.   But 
scipy_core installs should be settling down.   I agree that new users 
should be informed of the situation and allowed to choose their poison, 
recognizing that if they are the first to try it out on a new platform 
their may be issues.   It is important that people believe scipy_core 
can be installed without difficulty.  I think we've made lots of strides 
here, but no doubt will learn more as people try it out with strange 
configurations.  

As a data-point.  I was recently on a totally new system with intel's 
mkl BLAS and python setup.py install went fine after an SVN checkout and 
linked against the mkl BLAS without difficulty (and I didn't need to 
edit any configuration files either).   So, I was pretty happy with 
that.  Thanks, Pearu....

Right now, it's just the sub-packages in basic (fft, linalg, and random) 
that are being shuffled a bit so that the name-space collisions with 
full scipy and the import magic will disappear.  I'm *thrilled* to see 
the web-page receive the overhaul and point people in the right direction.

-Travis