[SciPy-dev] SciPy improvements

[Robert Kern]

David Cournapeau wrote:

> Since you're here, I have some questions concerning chaco for the 
> visualization part of the project. Basically, I am unsure about whether 
> I should use chaco or matplotlitb. I do not know chaco very well yet, 
> but it seems much better API and performance wise compared to matplotlib 
> for interactive visualization. The problem is that it still does not 
> have a lot of visibility to the community compared to matplotlib, and it 
> is still pretty complicated to install. I do not care much about those 
> points myself, but seeing how installation problems are one of the big 
> difficulty for newcommers to numpy/scipy, I am a bit concerned. Is this 
> impression funded, and if it is, is there a chance to see improvements 
> on those fronts in the next few months ?

Just installing Chaco and the stuff it depends on can actually be somewhat
easier than matplotlib: we don't bother with external libjpeg, libpng, and
libfreetype libraries. The major issue would actually be disabling building of
TVTK if you don't have VTK installed and you only care about Chaco, but even
that's a comment-out-one-line operation.

In the coming weeks, though, we will be playing around with a reorganization of
the repository along the lines of the scikits layout if you've been following
that conversation. That would enable one to just build the enthought subpackages
that you need, or allow easy_install to do so. Even if we don't end up
reorganizing the trunk that way, we'll probably have such a reorganized mirror
of the trunk using svn:externals to get the same effect for distribution purposes.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco