[Numpy-discussion] .debs of numpy-0.9.8 available for Ubuntu Dapper (original) (raw)

Andrew Straw strawman at astraw.com
Thu Jun 8 18:19:19 EDT 2006

Andrew Straw wrote:

I've put together some .debs for numpy-0.9.8. There are binaries compiled for amd64 and i386 architectures of Ubuntu Dapper, and I suspect these will build from source for just about any Debian-based distro and architecture.

As usually happens when I try to release packages in the middle of the night, the cold light of morning brings some glaring problems. The biggest one is that the .diff.gz that was generated wasn't showing the changes against numpy that I had to make. I'm surprised that my own tests with apt-get source showed that it still built from source.

I've uploaded a new version, 0.9.8-0ads2 (note the 2 at the end). You can check your installed version by doing the following: dpkg-query -l numpy

Anyhow, here's the debian/changelog for 0.9.8-0ads2:

I would like to merge with the package in debian experimental by Jose Fonseca and Marco Presi, but their package uses a lot of makefile wizardry that bombs out on me without any apparently informative error message. (I will be the first to admit that I know very little about Makefiles.) On the other hand, the main advantage their package currently has is installation of manpages for f2py, installation of the existing free documentation, and tweaks to script (f2py) permissions and naming. The latter of these issues seems to be solved by the build-dependency on setuptools, which is smart about installing scripts with the right permissions and names (it appends "2.4" to the python2.4 version of f2py, and so on).

There have been a couple of offers of help from Ed and Ryan. I think in the long run, the best thing to do would be to invest these efforts communicating with the debian developers and to get a more up-to-date version in their repository. (My repository will only ever be an unofficial repository with the primary purpose of serving our needs at work which hopefully overlaps substantially with usefulness to others.) This should have a trickle-down effect to mainline Ubuntu repository, also. I doubt that the debian developers will want to start their python-numpy package from scratch, so I can suggest trying to submit patches to their system. You can checkout their source at svn://svn.debian.org/deb-scipy . Unfortunately, that's about the only guidance I can provide, because, like I said above, I can't get their Makefile wizardry to work on a newer version of numpy.

Arnd, I would like to get to the bottom of these atlas issues myself, and I've followed a similar chain of logic as you. It's possible that the svd routine (dgesdd, IIRC) is somehow just a bad one to benchmark on. It is a real workhorse for me, and so it's really the one that counts for me. I'll put together a few timeit routines that test svd() and dot() and do some more experimentation, although I can't promise when. Let's keep everyone informed of any progress we make.

Cheers! Andrew

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