Hi, On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:07 PM, Aaron Meurer <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Matthew Brett <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 3:57 PM, Aaron Meurer <[email protected]> wrote: >>> This Windows installer is problematic. We are not really able to test >>> it. I think we should probably stop making it. For one thing, it >>> doesn't work everywhere (e.g., you can't make a 64-bit installer >>> unless you are using Windows). If there is interest, I can try to >>> debug and fix it, but otherwise, I think we should just stop making >>> them. >>> >>> My recommendation to anyone installing on Windows is to just use >>> Anaconda. See http://docs.sympy.org/latest/install.html#anaconda. >>> That will just work, and if it doesn't, Continuum has the resources to >>> fix the problem. And it comes with a bunch of other stuff like the >>> IPython notebook and matplotlib that you might find useful when using >>> SymPy. >> >> Did y'all try the installer at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ > > Yes, I forgot about the Gohlke installers. This was is preferred if > you already have Python installed and you want to install into it. > Note that your Python has to be registered in the Windows registry for > these installers to work (and probably for the ones we currently ship > to work as well).
Why not ask Christophe if Sympy pypi can use his installers? It seems a shame to send users off-site. >> >> I'm happy to help with the windows installer. >> >> We have a windows 7 64 bit machine you are also welcome to use; Ondrej >> has login and remote desktop access to that, I can give access to >> anyone who needs it. > > I honestly am still in favor of just not making them any more. I > really like that I can do a whole release of SymPy, including testing, > in under an hour on my machine. Windows installers complicate that > (right now they aren't even tested), and if they will require a > separate machine to make/test, that will complicate things even more. For our own projects, we do nightly runs of building the bdists and installing them and testing them on the buildbots. It would be easy to set that up for Sympy. > We can also look at building wheels. Those are supposed to be the > future on Windows anyway. But there's again the issue of testing. > SymPy is pure Python, so even on Windows a source install shouldn't be > a huge deal, at least relatively speaking. > But if you want to try to implement some stuff, PRs are welcome. > Everything is at https://github.com/sympy/sympy/tree/master/release. Any comment on what you need for the windows installers, other than automated testing? >> >> The question of whether to defer to (Canopy, Anaconda) has come up a >> few times on various lists. It seems to me that has some serious >> risks that we can avoid by making good windows installers. > > What are the serious risks? I imagine it is in the interest of (Continuum / Enthought) that most people using Scientific Python will be using (Anaconda, Canopy), for various reasons. The interests of (Continuum / Enthought) may or may not coincide with the interests of the open-source community at large, and they may change. Making OSX and Windows users dependent on Anaconda and / or Canopy makes the whole community vulnerable to changes in interest or policy by the companies, and means that we have to depend on the existence of their support machinery. One of the big draws of Python as compared to MATLAB, say, is that Python is free, open source, and supported by the community. Some proportion of users would be less interested in Python if the ActiveState installer was the only installer for Windows, for example. The same applies to the situation where practical use of scientific python depends on using a large company-owned distribution. Understandably, many developers don't themselves use these large packages, and prefer to install from source. This means a disconnection between the developers and the users. For example, I know that the IPython team advocates one of Canopy or Anaconda for user installs, but I don't think any of the developers in Berkeley use either of these. If we the packagers don't produce binary installers, it takes users and developers away from those supporting these installers, and python distutils problem. That's a damn shame because this is a serious long-term problem in the Python ecosystem. I'm not suggesting that we deprecate the large installers, but only we be careful to make sure that other options exist. I'm happy to do the extra work over the hour needed for sympy release, to generate the windows installers, and test them. Cheers, Matthew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
