[SciPy-user] Debian package(s)?

[Pearu Peterson]

On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, eric jones wrote:

> > 
> > I'm a little muddled now as to when and how the scipy_distutils gets
> > used.  I think that f2py uses those files at runtime.  So they have to
> > be installed when building scipy (i.e. when running f2py).  But I
> > recall someone claiming that scipy doesn't need the distutils at
> > runtime. (?)
> 
> scipy_distutils gets used by other things now besides scipy such as
> weave and I think Chaco is using it.  It gets bundled automatically by
> weave's setup.py into the weave distribution.  Rolling scipy_distutils
> into f2py will make f2py a dependency for weave -- not desirable.  But
> then neither is the current setup.  

I agree with both conclusions.

> We have three low level packages now: scipy_base, scipy_distutils, and
> scipy_test.  Gui_thread might fall into this group also.  A lot of other
> packages will depend on one or more of these -- f2py, scipy, weave,
> chaco, etc.  It sounding like we really need to bundle the first three
> (or four) packages into a separate package (scipy_core?) to ease the
> issues with debian packages, rpm's etc.  scipy_core could then be listed
> as a dependency by the other packages.
> 
> The only thing that makes me hesitate about this is that f2py is
> currently pure python.  If we make it depend on scipy_core, the
> scipy_base module does have some C modules in it that people will have
> to build.  Since f2py really doesn't need any part of scipy_base, this
> dependency is a result of how things are packaged.  To get around this,
> we could package scipy_distutils and scipy_test together and leave
> scipy_base in the scipy package.  Then f2py would only have pure python
> modules as dependencies.  Pearu (and others), is this a big win for you,
> or would you rather bundle all of them together as a single file?

I would like to keep f2py a separate package for purely f2py users (the
number of such users is not small).

So, I like the first option (that also more or less coincides with the
proposal in my last mail). To summarize explicitly:

1) scipy_distutils and scipy_test are bundled to scipy_core
2) scipy_base stays in scipy (at least for the time being)
3) The following packages are stand-alone and all depend on scipy_core:
   scipy, weave, f2py2e, chaco, etc.
4) scipy depends also on weave, f2py2e, chaco(?in future), etc.


> I'm thinking the windows package will continue to be a single
> click-install bundle with everything in it.

Yes. Everything above applies only for non-windows systems.

Pearu