[SciPy-dev] The future of SciPy and its development infrastructure

[Nathan Bell]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 1:34 PM, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>> And I'd argue for:
>> - someone who we can spam when scipy.X fails
>> - a setup.py that didn't lead to questions about Fortran ABI incompatibilities
>> - a setup.py (or equivalent) with bdist_foo for every foo we care about
>> - a ~6 month cycle and nightly builds (with binary installers)
>> - a website where the scipy.X maintainer can see errors for their
>> module on a dozen different platforms
>
> I would argue those issues are not orthogonal to the quality of the
> tools we are using. The time I waste on trac and svn is time I don't
> spend on those issues, and this time easily go up to hours now.
>

The collective time wasted by Fortran ABI problems *alone* is 10x more
than that wasted by the problems you seek to remedy.  I've been using
development versions of scipy for 2 years now and even I get burned by
which fortran/BLAS/LAPACK I need to install.

-- 
Nathan Bell wnbell at gmail.com
http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~wnbell/