[SciPy-dev] Building scipy on Debian Woody.

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

hi,

Earlier scipy used to modify the Numeric install and required one to
link scipy/Numerical to the Numeric sources.  However, with Numeric
20.3 this no longer seems necessary?  Or is it?  Fernando's document
also makes no mention of this.  Whats the deal?

I also had difficulty when I made a clean rebuild with the fftw_thread
libraries.  The shared libs were there and somehow was not detected.
The problem vanished when I installed the fftw-dev package in woody
which installs the static libs and also creates libfftw_threads.so
links correctly.  However, please note that
site-packages/scipy/fftw/fftw.so is only dynamically linked.  So it
seems like a packaging error (NOT in scipy but in the debian package)
that there are no libfftw.so links made in /usr/lib.

As regards the installation procedure mentioned in Fernando's page
I'd recomend doing this:

    python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local

instead of plain

    python setup.py install

without the prefix the packages are installed in /usr which can be
painful.

FWIW, I'd like to mention that somehow Python 2.1.2 has some trouble
with f2py.  I still havent figured this out.  Pearu was saying that
upgrading to Python 2.2 fixes this.

thanks,
prabhu