[SciPy-dev] F2PY future

[Ondrej Certik]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Pearu Peterson <pearu at cens.ioc.ee> wrote:
> On Fri, April 11, 2008 7:36 pm, Nathan Bell wrote:
>  > On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 6:07 AM, Pearu Peterson <pearu at cens.ioc.ee> wrote:
>  >
>  >>  However, there are rumours of cleaning up scipy/numpy from extension
>  >>  generation tools and so in long term, f2py may need to look for another
>  >>  home.
>  >
>  > Do you mean that NumPy/SciPy would no longer include f2py source code
>
>  yes, but that is just a rumour:), one should not expect that to
>  happen in near future. I think first we need g3 f2py.
>
>
>  > or that NumPy/SciPy would no longer use extension generation tools at
>  > all?
>
>  they should certainly do that as extension generation tools
>  guarantee higher quality of the extension modules than writing
>  hundreds of extension modules by hand.
>
>
>  >>  So, I wonder if a hosting could be provided for f2py? Say, in a
>  >>  form of f2py.scipy.org or www.f2py.org? I am rather ignorant about
>  >> these
>  >>  matters, so any help will be appreciated.
>  >
>  > If you haven't done so already, register f2py.org immediately (and
>  > possibly the .com as well).  Many registration services (e.g.
>  > godaddy.com) allow you to forward the URL to another URL.  For
>  > instance, http://pyamg.org currently redirects to
>  > http://code.google.com/p/pyamg/.  If you chose to run your own host in
>  > the future, then you can just point the DNS record for your domain to
>  > the host's IP.
>
>  Thanks for the hints, they were very useful. I have registered
>  f2py.org and f2py.com domains and the redirections work
>  fine. This solves one problem: now one can advertise f2py via
>  www.f2py.com (or www.f2py.org) and it should be stable at
>  least for the next 10 years:).


Excellent.

Let me add, that I, as the user of f2py and also right now one of the
maintainers of the numpy/scipy packages in Debian, I find it really
bad, if the tools
move around from a package to package so often. It makes thing really
hard to package and follow.

As an example, Debian sarge, Debian etch and Debian lenny all have
different ways how to install and work with numpy, scipy and f2py.
This is bad, because everyone has to relearn all the time and also if
you, say, install scipy from sources (because the released version is
too old), it's freaking hard, because I cannot just take use the same
tricks as in unstable, because things has moved around since etch.

So my suggestion is either choose numpy, or your own f2py package, but
stick to it forever. :)

Also, how are you going to handle and package this g3 f2py? Cannot it
be just part of the regular f2py?

Ondrej