On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 2:12 AM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Hi all, > > I'm wondering what people think of the idea of us (= numpy) stopping > providing our "official" win32 builds (the "superpack installers" > distributed on sourceforge) starting with the next release. > > These builds are: > > - low quality: they're linked to an old & untuned build of ATLAS, so > linear algebra will be dramatically slower than builds using MKL or > OpenBLAS. They're win32 only and will never support win64. They're > using an ancient version of gcc. They will never support python 3.5 or > later. > > - a dead end: there's a lot of work going on to solve the windows > build problem, and hopefully we'll have something better in the > short-to-medium-term future; but, any solution will involve throwing > out the current system entirely and switching to a new toolchain, > wheel-based distribution, etc. > > - a drain on our resources: producing these builds is time-consuming > and finicky; I'm told that these builds alone are responsible for a > large proportion of the energy spent preparing each release, and take > away from other things that our release managers could be doing (e.g. > QA and backporting fixes). > Once numpy-vendor is set up, preparing and running the builds take about fifteen minutes on my machine. That assumes familiarity with the process, a first time user will spend significantly more time. Most of the work in a release is keeping track of reported bugs and fixing them. Tracking deprecations and such also takes time. > So the idea would be that for 1.11, we create a 1.11 directory on > sourceforge and upload one final file: a README explaining the > situation, a pointer to the source releases on pypi, and some links to > places where users can find better-supported windows builds (Gohlke's > page, Anaconda, etc.). I think this would serve our users better than > the current system, while also freeing up a drain on our resources. > What about beta releases? I have nothing against offloading part of the release process, but if we do, we need to determine how to coordinate it among the different parties, which might be something of a time sink in itself. Chuck
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