Happy new year everyone! David Cournapeau from the NumPy project has (with good reason, IMO) grown fed up with distutils, and is launching an effort to get the scientific Python community off the distutils habit. (This has of course given rise to some controversy, but David appears to have given it a lot of thinking over the course of many years).
It's been a long-standing issue that the scientific Python community has more complicated needs to build systems than the Python web development community, which currently drives the distutils/setuptools/distribute projects. Also end-users rather than sysadmins typically installs software and so on. The full discussion is here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/35276 As a summary, David propose: a) An easy way to get off the distutils for building without loosing the ability to very easily make a distributable Python package. David has started "toydist" to accomplish this: Declarative metadata rather than a setup.py. b) Tools to create RPMs, DEBs, OS X installers, Windows installers etc. from Python packages. c) A website a la PyPI for scientific Python projects (but done right!) (dubbed SciPI, but perhaps jokingly), with automatic build farms/validation on package upload etc. I think these developments are worth keeping track of (and support, at least morally) for the Sage project as well -- imagine being able to upload a simple Python package to the SciPI website, and have SPKGs generated and tested automatically (in addition to DEBs, Windows installers etc.). This could make the typical "SciPy stack" developers automatically or more easily provide Sage SPKGs for lots of scientific software (such as mpi4py, PyTables, etc.) Pierre Raybaut of the Python(x,y) project has already voiced his support of the project and says he might in the future convert the Python(x,y) package distribution system to what David proposes. -- Dag Sverre -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
