[SciPy-dev] Re: scipy and ATLAS (in)dependency

[Michael Reimpell]

> Quite honestly, these days building scipy even from CVS very easy 
(...)
> python setup.py install

For at least some system administrators scattering files into the system 
without adequate packaging managment is not an option. Supported software has 
to fit into the system mainenance process, i.e. on most systems "apt-get 
upgrade" should keep the software up to date. At the moment scipy an its 
dependencies are not very rpm-friendly:

Numeric and SciPy both are statically linked against lapack and blas resp. 
atlas. While this may enhance speed, it also hands the architecture 
dependence over to SciPy.

The standard blas package, at least for fedora core 2, does not contain all 
libraries needed to build SciPy. Thus, this package has to be replaced which 
may interfere with other applications like octave and scilab.

F2PY's setup.py has some failing preconditions about the path, when changing 
to the 'src' directory in line 49:
"F2PY Version 2.43.239_1835
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 131, in ?
    if 'install' in sys.argv and need_scipy_distutils():
  File "setup.py", line 49, in need_scipy_distutils
    os.chdir('src')
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'src'
Fehler: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.43647 (%install)"
This prevents the rpm from being build.

Both, SciPy and Scipy_core have failing preconditions about the number of rpm 
packages build. E.g. on fedora core 2 the rpm packages build in 
build/bdist.linux-i686/rpm/RPMS/i386/ are SciPy-0.3.1_287.4340-1.i386.rpm and 
SciPy-debuginfo-0.3.1_287.4340-1.i386.rpm

Another minor issue is that the spelling of the package names is inconsistent: 
SciPy vs. Scipy vs. scipy.

Ways to overcome these problems could be: 
Dynamically link atlas and lapack libraries and provide reasonable default rpm 
packages, e.g. i386, i686, athlon and x86_64, for them and standard packages 
(i386, noarch) for the rest.

Statically link atlas and lapack libraries and provide reasonable default rpm 
packages.

Provide src-rpm packages or spec-files.

Michael