On Oct 10, 2015 3:37 PM, "Laura Creighton" <l...@openend.se> wrote:
>
> In a message of Sat, 10 Oct 2015 21:52:58 -0000, Oscar Benjamin writes:
>
> >Really this is just a case of an unsupported platform. It's unfortunate
> >that CPython doesn't properly support this hardware but I think it's
> >reasonable that if you have to build your interpreter from source then
you
> >have to build your extension modules as well.
>
> Alas that there is no easy way to detect.  The situation I am
> imagining is where the administrators of a school build pythons for
> the students to run on their obsolete hardware, and then the poor
> students don't understand why pip doesn't work.  But I suppose we
> will just get to deal with that problem when and if it happens.

In case some numbers help: the numerical community has been tracking the
deployment of SSE2 to decide when to switch over for numpy/scipy builds,
and at this point what I hear is:
- ~0.5% of Firefox crashes are on machines that are missing SSE2
- <0.1% of machines with Steam installed are missing SSE2

I'm not sure what python distributions like Anaconda or Activestate are
doing wrt SSE2, but even if their builds do require SSE2 then their build
tooling might provide a quick way to generate a whole installable
environment with custom build options for targeting older systems.
(Continuum as of today still hasn't released build scripts for the bottom
of their stack -- python/numpy/etc. -- but they've claimed willingness to
do so and there's increasing calls to make a "centos" version of Anaconda.
And all the tooling beyond that -- e.g. the actual package manager -- is
FOSS.)

-n
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