"Best" Python distribution for debian (Ubuntu) Linux?

[Ian]

In the past I have installed packages as needed. Things have worked,
but it would be nice to use one single congruent distribution for most
of the packages I need...something like enthought, but free (enthought
only has free in 32 bit). Sage has no package for debian...

[Ethan Coon]

Agreed. I've been using virtualenv, which enables me to have a
separate site-packages and all that jazz to keep my own python
libraries separate from the OS distribution's libraries. That works
OK, and can allow you to install a completely separate python to keep
things completely independent of the OS python. It's not a true
distribution though, in that it will make keeping multiple pythons
straight easy, but it doesn't also bundle various libraries/modules.

The one I have heard of is from Ondrej Certik, who has helped with the
Sage development. He uses Sage as a stand-alone distribution -- it
includes python, numpy, and many libraries -- and adds his own extra
packages as he needs. Then again, I haven't tried it, so I don't know
how comprehensive it is for what people want, nor do I know how
hard/easy it is to get working. But it is a python distribution
(hidden under libraries for symbolic math in python) and it includes
many of the things that computational python people want, so it may be
worth a closer look. And while it has no debian package, I'm pretty
sure I've installed it on my laptop at one point and found it easy to
do from scratch.

Ondrej may be on this list... if not I'll hit him with an email and
ask him to ping the list with a description of how that works.

Other than that, no clue.

Ethan

--

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Ethan Coon
DOE CSGF - Graduate Student
Dept. Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics
Columbia University
212-854-0415

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~ecoon/
-------------------------------------------------------------------

[Ian Langmore]

Yeah if you could talk to Ondrej that would be good. I've considered
Sage. I think it includes a bunch of stuff that I don't really want,
and I'm wondering if that will cause a hassle. Also, with no debian
specific distribution, I wonder if it will cause some problems.

-Ian

[Ian Langmore]

So I installed virtualenv. I activate the environment, and then try to
install numpy using pip
$ pip -E . install numpy

I then get a bunch of errors about dependencies that I haven't
satisfied. Can I get pip (or easy_install) to automatically install
these? Most of these dependencies are non-python (e.g. fortran). Will
pip install these in my virtual environment? I can't seem to get pip to
list these dependencies in a nice way. Basically, it seems like if I
use virtualenv I give up the convenience of synaptic. Am I wrong?

-Ian

On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 10:07 -0500, Ethan Coon wrote: