On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn<[email protected]> wrote: > [email protected] wrote: >> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 2:36 AM, Fernando Perez<[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 4:44 PM, David Cournapeau<[email protected]> wrote: >>>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 1:33 AM, Fernando >>>> Perez<[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> By the way, David did this on a wine setup he has on his Mac laptop in >>>>> just a couple of minutes! So it seems that once you have the right >>>>> setup, it's not a huge deal. >>>> It is quite easy to set up: you can install wine for mac os x >>>> (darwine), install python + mingw into wine, and that's it. >>>> >>>> I have for example an alist winepy="WINEPATH >>>> $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Python25/python.exe", and then making the binary >>>> is just an issue of: >>>> >>>> winepy setup.py bdist_wininst >>>> >>>> Numpy and scipy binaries are actually entirely built under wine as >>>> well nowadays, it is a viable alternative to the endless windows pain. >>> I should add that Stefan vdW pointed out to me that the detailed >>> tutorial on how to set this wine machinery lives in fact on the Cython >>> wiki :) >>> >>> http://wiki.cython.org/BuildingWindowsInstaller >>> >>> I did it a few days ago, and I can now build a Cython installer in no time >>> flat: >>> >>> maqroll[Cython-0.11.2]> uname -a >>> Linux maqroll 2.6.28-15-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 18 18:40:08 UTC >>> 2009 i686 GNU/Linux >>> maqroll[Cython-0.11.2]> time wine python setup.py bdist_wininst >>> Compiling module Cython.Plex.Scanners ... >>> Compiling module Cython.Compiler.Scanning ... >>> Compiling module Cython.Compiler.Parsing ... >>> Compiling module Cython.Compiler.Visitor ... >>> Compiling module Cython.Runtime.refnanny ... >>> running bdist_wininst >>> >>> [... snip long output ] >>> >>> adding 'PLATLIB\pyximport\pyxbuild.py' >>> adding 'SCRIPTS\cython.py' >>> creating dist >>> removing 'build\bdist.win32\wininst' (and everything under it) >>> >>> real 0m20.775s >>> user 0m5.764s >>> sys 0m0.500s >>> >>> This is really great: the setup takes a few minutes, and now I don't >>> even have to fire up VirtualBox and spend any time in the godforsaken >>> hell that is Windows to build installers for code with C extensions! >> >> There is no reason for this language, there are a lot of us who like >> Windows, and if you look at the numpy/scipy mailinglist then the only >> build issues are with the hundreds of versions of unix/linux. > > Your statement here in turn provokes me. I'd like to try to stop short > of a flamewar, but I have to say something: > > Like David said, this is simply because Windows-users don't build their > own software!! A lot of time in open source is spent on Windows-support, > it's just that few of the typical mailing list participants build it > themselves! (Implication: They can't contribute to development versions!) > > Windows support takes a good deal of time from open source development > -- while my feeling is relatively few Windows users take the trouble to > contribute back (with some honorable exceptions, of course; here on the > list the recent pyximport patches have come from Windows users for > instance). > > (One quote in support of this heard during SciPy 09: All SymPy devs use > Linux or Mac. Yet the number of Windows downloads are much higher.) > > I'm always tempted to say that I believe Cython should simply say that > we do not support Windows, or Visual C, until we can AT THE VERY LEAST > find one user who actually use Windows on a daily basis who volunteers > to do the relatively trivial task of testing new releases and packaging > it for exe distribution about four times a year. > > -- > Dag Sverre
I really appreciate all the work that non-Windows developers (especially David) are doing to support our platform, and I'm sorry if I sounded too harsh and thank you Fernando. a disclaimer and a few impressions from a Windows user: A disclaimer, I know very little about C, nothing about cross-platform differences in C, and I'm keeping track of cython mostly for future use in scipy but currently don't use it myself, except for some experimentation. I'm more interested in application programming than compiler and build issues and my main programming languages are matlab and python (and gauss). Additionally, I have been involved in any open source project for less than a year. And I'm using Windows since Windows95 came out and crashed on me every half hour with a nice blue screen. My main motivation for my initial reply and for comments in other scipy related mailing lists, is to avoid the impression that it is very difficult or impossible to build on Windows. With the mingw setup, it is relatively easy to build many SciPy related packages for Windows32. (As I said, I don't know anything about the underlying c code.) I think Windows users should be less worried or scared about building the packages themselves. I was when I tried to build scipy and numpy the first few times. It requires a one-time setup, but then it's just a call to setup.py. But the impression on the mailing lists is that, if there is a c extension, then a Windows user doesn't even need to try this impossible task. In spring, I helped to debug and fix the build and install problems for nipy on Windows with mingw, which was almost only a question of getting the infrastructure with mingw and numpy correctly set up (except for the bugs in nipy). If cython were to drop Windows support, it would be impossible for me to work on any cython code in scipy, and I expect that the share of cython code in numpy/scipy will increase over time. Other reasons for the lack of windows developers, I think, are, that windows user are proportionally more interested in application than low-level programming, and the chicken-and-egg problem, the preferred development style for Windows and Posix users is not exactly the same. (I'm a bit, but not too surprised about the computer choice of sympy developers, since git is not very windows friendly, but that's a different debate.) Thank you for the improvements in the numerical support in cython, I hope to be using it soon. Josef _______________________________________________ Cython-dev mailing list [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/cython-dev
