On 10/13/2012 12:07 AM, Anthony Scopatz wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I just want to second Greg's concerns here in regards to the
> minimal, core stack being too minimal and not core enough.
> While I am disappointed in the exclusion of HDF5 from this,
> I am democratic enough to submit to the will of the people ;)
Huh? I actually didn't connect Greg's post with Thomas' efforts at all,
they're rather separate things? Greg's post read more like a petition
for EPD and Anaconda to include more stuff to me.
Thomas' efforts will make it easier to specify the dependencies of your
code, collapsing 3-5 of your dependencies to a single item in your
manual. Also you can easier bump your dependency requirements for NumPy,
SciPy, etc. in lock step, rather than having to think about which SciPy
matches which NumPy and so on.
Also, it's a bit of a PR and user-friendliness initiative.
> What makes things difficult, is that given stack as it stands
> it would be impossible to get the packages I need using just
> the mechanisms provided on new systems. So the core
> distribution isn't a significant step up from installing everything
> from scratch (which is what I do right now). That said:
>
> 1. Having a small core distribution is important!
> 2. I have some thoughts on a lightweight, stable & bleeding edge
> package manger that I will be implementing for some of my
> projects because current tools don't meet the need. I will make this
> public once it is ready.
Interesting. I'd love to hear more about what makes this different from
all the other attempts out there.
The funding for Hashdist (
https://github.com/certik/hashdist/wiki) is
slowly coming along (it's been stuck in a bureaucratic mill for ~1 year
now) and I'm optimistic about being able to spend two months full-time
on that soon (within the end of the year). Fingers crossed.
While Hashdist will be targeted for HPC clusters initially, that's just
due to the funding source and my own needs -- there's nothing stopping
the approach from working well with Windows and Mac pre-compiled
packages if somebody interested steps up.
What makes me optimistic about Hashdist is that it's a new idea in this
domain (although Nix
http://nixos.org provides prior art), rather than
new wrapping around the same old concepts.
> But to even make this useful on Windows (and maybe Mac?) would
> is a compiler (probably gcc via mingw, though clang via llvm would
> be an interesting choice) as well as the version control.
>
> To Jonathan's point about EPD Full/Academic, this is a good solution for
> most of my needs However, it still lacks version control which I need to
> install on my own. But it is the mechanism I have been using to-date ;).
>
> So I guess I am petitioning for some executive action in this democracy!
For me it's all a matter of getting some funding through. I think the
problem is way too hard to be left to spare-time efforts.
Dag Sverre