[SciPy-dev] {Num, Sci}Py on 64bit Intel Macs with icc, ifort, mkl

[David Cournapeau]

Ulrik Günther wrote:
>
> Glitches I've noticed were, for example, that the MKL is not
> detected properly, as the Accelerate Framework is checked before and 
> there seems to be no option to tell the distutils that
> one wants to use the Intel MKL. 

Yes, normally you can disable one lib with an environment variable (such 
as MKL=None will disable MKL even if detected), but this is not 
implemented for the Accelerate framework, from quickly looking at the 
sources.

>
> If there my help is needed, can somebody point me to anyone who is 
> more familiar with the distutils (say: who knows where
> in the source code which check for this and that library is and who 
> can give me a short overview of the build system - I already
> got a, well, tentative one, but I want to avoid mistakes ;) ),

Solving the Accelerate framework problem should be relatively easy: look 
at numpy/distutils/system_info.py.  The link problems, I don't know, 
since you have not given enough details for them. The numpy build 
process is based on the python package distutils: distutils is a really 
badly designed piece of code, and extremely fragile to changes (it is 
one more proof that you can write Fortran in any language) and jumping 
in is not easy.

I personally would be interested in supporting this configuration with 
my own project numscons, which is a tentative to circumvent distutils 
limitations to build numpy and scipy.

cheers,

David