On 13 July 2013 20:59, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > It would be nice to get feedback from "normal users" on this. I suspect that > the scientific community would make a good cross-section (AIUI there's quite > a lot of Windows use, and for many people in the community Python is very > much a tool, rather than a way of life :-)). Does anyone have links into the > scipy groups? I lurk on the IPython lists, so I could ask there, at a > pinch...
I don't know if I really count as a normal user but I can describe how Python is installed on the Windows machines in my faculty for scientific use. All our Windows machines have the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD) installed. This bundles CPython with numpy, scipy, matplotlib, wxpython, setuptools, pip and a whole load more. Ordinary users do not need to install numpy etc. since these are pre-installed. The bootstrap process is probably irrelevant since EPD installs easy_install and that can be used to install pip if desired. Ordinary users do not have write access to the EPD installation directory and so can only use pip/easy_install with --user anyway. On my own desktop machine which runs Windows all of the Python installations I use are inside my user directory so there is no meaningful difference between 'pip install' and 'pip install --user'. The real problem for us with using e.g. pip to install something like numpy is that it will not install the appropriate non-Python external libraries. For example, numpy ships with a just functional BLAS library but you really want to install and have it link against proper BLAS/LAPACK libraries. The good free libraries should be compiled on the target machine and pypi/pip/distutils do not currently help much with doing this. Debian (or at least Ubuntu) provides for example the ATLAS library as a source only package. This means that you can compile it on the target machine and get the most out of your CPU capabilities while still using the Debian tools to obtain the dependencies and manage the build process. The new wheel format will not help with this since even if there were an ATLAS wheel it would probably be a generic 686 binary without e.g. SSE. This is another advantage of using EPD which ships the non-free Intel MKL library. Python(x, y) is similar to EPD but is GPL'd and ships with OpenBLAS. Both distributions also ship MinGW which is useful since it's likely that our Windows machines will not have the appropriate MSVC version to match up with the CPython version. (They also don't suffer from Issue12641 so MinGW works). Oscar _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
