Hi, I have been doing quite a bit of numpy evangelism here at my work and slowly people are starting to use it. One of the main things people are interested in is f2py. But, I am finding that there is one persistent problem that keeps coming up when people try to install numpy on various systems:
In three cases I have found that numpy failed to find and use a fortran compiler because the version string didn't match what was hardcoded into numpy.distutils. The reality is that version strings are in no way "standardized". In the most recent cases, we had a version of the lahey compiler that had the extra word "Express" and in another case, the xlf version string on a supercomputer was completely different. What is crazy to me is that this simple mismatch prevents numpy from even trying the compiler. Can we please change how Numpy handles the version string of fortran compilers? My suggestion would be to simply print the version string, but to attempt to use the compiler no matter what the version string is. That way, the success or failure of using the fortran compiler will be determined by the actual compiler, not its version string. There could be some other smart way of handling this, but I think it should be dealt with to make the installation process easier. I am willing to work up a patch if there is agreement on what should be done. Oh, the other difficult thing is that in the current arrangement, numpy.distutils doesn't print an error message that is easy to debug. It just silently does find the compiler rather than saying why. Thanks Brian _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
