[SciPy-User] build from source on RHEL6

[David]

On 02/23/2011 07:18 AM, Gavin W. Burris wrote:
> Hi Ralf,
>
> I think it would be very hard for anyone but a professional programmer
> to build scipy with the current directions.

We are aware of the issue. It is unfortunately quite difficult to fix, 
because the issue is complex. Building numpy/scipy itself is not so hard 
nowadays on linux because most distributions have only one fortran 
compiler (gfortran), instead of g77 vs gfortran which are incompatible 
between each other.

Blas/lapack/atlas are often badly packaged, poorly tested by 
distributions (to be fair, they are hard to build and test). There are 
tons of inconsistencies between them: the library names, locations and 
conventions are different between distributions and even between 
versions of a same distribution. That's why documenting it is so hard - 
it takes time, and has to be done for many combinations of softwares.

On top of that, the build infrastructure around python is poorly thought 
out for complex packages like numpy - the pletora of options you saw are 
a direct consequence of those issues.

cheers,

David