[SciPy-Dev] Would it be acceptable to give up subpackage build ?

[David Cournapeau]

Hi there,

I have made enough progress on bento recently to start tackling the
meat of the issue: building numpy and scipy with it. Numpy goes
nicely, but scipy causes issues because of the following constraing:
in scipy, each package with a setup.py is a self-contained package,
i.e. you can just do python setup.py build in scipy/lib/blas, and it
will run. Is it acceptable to give up on this in the long run ?

I don't see much advantages in that feature, and giving it up has
several nice advantages:
- one can have a global configure stage (i.e. check blas/lapack only
once instead of many times as done currently, although the way
numpy.distutils has near 0 cost since it only stat files)
- I would expect the build to be faster and more accurate
- it makes my life easier for bento

Note that this has no incidence on the existing distutils-based infrastructure,

cheers,

David