As someone who has struggled to get PDL working on my Mac, I empathize with your frustration.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Daniel Carrera <[email protected]> wrote: > It is extremely frustrating that installing PDL so that everything > works would be such a huge pain in the neck. I have recovered the > original PDL I had before. Still no 3D graphics, but at least the other > features that worked before still work now. I don't think it has PLplot > either. I don't dare try it. > Yup. PLplot continues to give me unending grief. > Why does it have to be so difficult to get PDL working on *Linux* of > all things? If we were at least talking about a non-unix platform, or > some really obscure distribution, I'd understand. But this is plain > regular Ubuntu Linux we're talking about. > > I didn't have to go through this trouble when I installed Octave, > Scilab or Gnuplot. Those were just a simple apt-get away. > I believe Numpy/Scipy too are pretty complicated to install, at least, on a Mac, unless one uses a readymade installer such as the one Enthought provides. An analog of that would be SciKarl on the Mac. By definition, these installers would be platform specific. > I first experimented with PDL ten years ago. Today it seems to have > basically the features it had 10 years ago, and even the website > doesn't look like it's changed much. I would think that after 10 years > it would be possible to make PDL *install* reliably. If after 10 years > it is still not possible to make PDL installable, I have little hope > that in another 10 years it will be any better. > Once again, I empathize with you, but this is where we diverge. Since I am not developing PDL, I believe I can kvetch about it, but only within reason, and as long as it comes wrapped in appreciation for the voluntary work that the developers are putting into it. No one is forcing me or you to use PDL. We want to because we want to use its capabilities with our favorite programming language. The developers are and will continue to first and foremost make it work with their own programming environment. Others are supposed to pitch in and make it work on different platforms. If you feel so frustrated by the current condition of PDL on platform x, and want to use PDL on platform x, well then, contribute to making it work. All that said, yes, it would be nice if PDL would install cleanly and nicely on all platforms for all its extensions, which it does already, for the most part. It is a few specific extensions that fail or give grief. Yes, I am very unhappy with being unable to successfully build PDL on my Mac (I am not installing SciKarl because it will install in my system perl and I won't be able to use it with my regular app development, all of which happens against my own installed /usr/local/bin/perl), but let the following be noted unequivocally -- I am interminably and unstintingly grateful for PDL and for the work of its developers. Thanks. -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Assertions are politics; backing up assertions with evidence is science ======================================================================= _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
