[SciPy-dev] old web site front page

[Perry Greenfield]

On Dec 22, 2005, at 10:06 AM, Joe Harrington wrote:

> You and Ed came up with similar suggestions (on your first two
> points).  Sure, take out the "VERY" and change "like" to "don't mind".
> But, the more you guys argue that this is not a hard install, the more
> you convince me that it is!  Arnd, you applied FIVE conditions just to
> make it "pretty clean"!  But, the "pretty clean" builds have binary
> installs already, leaving the "not-so-clean" and "decidedly rotten"
> ones for trial by newbies.  Recall that this message is going to
> people who have never installed SciPy and never used it!  We're not
> talking to list members here, we're talking to the guy that walked
> into my office the other day and said, hey, I hear you know something
> about this free IDL for Python (I cringed).  Sure, he's typed "make
> install" a bunch in the past.  But, I wouldn't wish a newcore build on
> him, let alone a full build.  He's got work to do, and he's more
> likely to walk away from this if it wastes his time than to dig in.
>
> Is SVN better than tarball?  I'll leave that to a developer to say.
> We can change it as the story changes.
>
> --jh--
>
I'll second Joe on this issue. My sense is the ususal denizens of 
scipy, being comparatively sophisticated (despite proclamations to the 
contrary :-) in doing installations, are not aware of how an important 
issue this is. I have had many people come to me and say they tried 
scipy before and that they gave up trying to install it. When I tell 
them that numarray is being replaced with scipy the usual reaction is 
of great worry because of the installation issue (I try my best to 
convince them that the core will be as easy to install and so forth). 
You won't hear from most of these people if they try and fail. They 
will just give up and associate bad things with the project. For that 
reason I think it is important not to oversell scipy_core to the 
general community until it has been beaten on for a while, 
installation-wise and shown to be a pretty easy install, and 
comparatively stable (seeing weekly updates will scare them quite a bit 
too).

I know many are eager to make the switch now, but telling the great 
masses to do so too soon will be deadly. We should encourage the 
experienced developers to do that now, but not the regular users. I 
think we are some months from being ready to do that. Some patience is 
needed here.

Perry