On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Matthew Brett <[email protected]> wrote: > 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'd feel more comfortable having people go to his site if they are getting his binaries. It's not that I don't trust Christophe Gohlke. Obviously he is trustable since a log of people use his installers. But if there are ever any issues, we would have to rely on him to fix them. I don't like having a single point of failure like that, especially when it's not someone within the community. I think it's fine to recommend his installers, though. We can remove our own builds, and recommend his as an alternative. > >>> >>> 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? Well, the real issue here is that it's *really* nice to be able to build, test, and upload the entire release on my machine, in an hour. Once you've tasted that it's kind of hard to go back to the hard way. Maybe it's possible to do that with Wine, or a VM, but it's a lot of work, and frankly, I don't see the value, because we can just point people to Windows installers that other people have made that *do* work, and that they actively support. And the fact that they are really only a convenience for SymPy anyway (since it is pure Python) exaserbates this. At any rate, I personally don't intend to spend any time making Windows installers work. > >>> >>> 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? OK, well this is the part where I put the disclaimer that I am (as of a week ago) a full time Continuum employee. But I remain lead developer of SymPy, and I intend to keep the interests of SymPy to be those of the SymPy community. > > 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. It's important I think to separate Anaconda (the Continuum Python distribution) and conda (its package manager). Conda is open source, and can be used independently of Anaconda. Conda is what aims to solve the distutils problem, by making it easy to create binary packages in a cross-platform way. In fact, a lot of people are starting to use conda (either using Anaconda or separate from it), because it really solves these problems (this includes people at Berkeley). The great thing about Anaconda (the distribution) is that it comes with things that really enhance the SymPy experience, like the IPython notebook, matplotlib, the IPython qtconsole (which is a serious pain to install from source even on Mac OS X), numpy, scipy, and so on. We have to remember with SymPy that we are part of the SciPy stack (http://www.scipy.org/about.html). > > 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. The issue is that I really want it to be possible to make the entire release by myself, whenever I want to. Far be it from me to turn away help, but the kind of help that actually isn't helpful is to say, "sure, I can help you do that whenever you do a release. Just ping me". Then the release becomes dependent on you. If I need to do a quick bugfix release or release before a conference or some other kind of deadline and you aren't available then we can't do the full release. And it isn't you personally. I don't want the release to become dependent on *any* one person, myself included. That's why I worked so hard to make the whole release process automated, so that it can be reproduced by anyone (with the caveat that I'll need to give you access to PyPI if you want to do it, but I'll do that for any core developer who volunteers to do a release). By the way, just to be clear of something, are you requesting the Windows installers, or just offering to help make them? I'm not asking to discredit you, but simply because if you do, that's an argument to do it (because as I noted earlier, if enough people request it, I could be convinced). Aaron Meurer > > 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. -- 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.
