[SciPy-dev] poll for renaming scipy_core online

[Andrew Straw]

Fernando Perez wrote:

>Andrew Straw wrote:
>
>  
>
>>OK, so following up on this, I've realized there's a potential issue here:
>>
>>If the "package name"  (what you call "name") above becomes, for the
>>sake of argument, numerix, does this mean that our distutils becomes
>>numerix.distutils?  And numerix.distutils and numerix.f2py would be
>>necessary for scipy?  An alternative is that the distribution could
>>distribute two top-level packages (e.g. numerix and scipy).
>>    
>>
>
>Why is this an issue?  
>
I just wanted to make sure the situation was clear to all. I found it
potentially confusing that scipy.distutils and scipy.f2py would become
part of the new package.

I think it is worth reiterating why distutils and f2py are included with
the new base package and not full scipy: As far as I can tell (correct
me if I'm wrong), distutils is included because it does a lot of nice
auto-detection of atlas, mkl, acml, and vecLib. Those packages are
linked into the base array package (rather than lapack_lite) where
possible. (This same issue is currently also the most challenging aspect
of installing Numeric or numarray, so the situation doesn't go away if
we, hypothetically speaking, shifted to Python distutils.) f2py's
reasons for inclusion aren't so clear to me, but as it's pure Python, I
don't mind its inclusion.

Cheers!
Andrew