[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 23 September 2012 20:17, Andreas Hilboll <lists at hilboll.de> wrote:
> I'm in favor of including both pytables and h5py. Otherwise, there will
> be people disappointed by pylab because a script given to them by
> someone else doesn't work.

This argument can be used for any package, though, and I don't want to
make the specification massive. The question is, if you're writing a
script, should you be able to assume users have pytables, h5py, or
both?

With respect to the other formats: can any of the packages handle more
than one of the three? Can anyone give a sense of how widely used HDF4
and netCDF4 are, beyond specific fields?

Of course, you can install extra packages to meet specific needs, and
a specific distribution can still ship them by default. A quick survey
of existing distributions suggests that EPD and Python(x,y) have pyhdf
and netCDF4, while Anaconda has neither. It's not clear whether SAGE
and QSnake do.

Thanks,
Thomas