[pymvpa] upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04LTS? How?

[Emanuele Olivetti]

Dear All,

In my lab (~10 quad core, mostly desktop) we all have Ubuntu 8.04LTS
and use the usual stack of libraries: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib,
PyMVPA, MDP, NetworkX, OpenOpt, PyNIFTI, graph-tool, mayavi2,
hcluster, etc. The current status is to rely on .deb packages provided
my main repositories (Ubuntu) plus few "less official" ;-) ones
(i.e. Michael's uni-magdeburg, Gael's ppa.launchpad.net etc.) and
very few installation from sources.

Since it is time to upgrade our old libraries (e.g. NumPy is 1.0.4!!)
we face the problem on how to handle the transition. I guess that
possible options are:

1) Upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 which would result in a general improvement,
even though not the bleeding edge of everything.

2) Install locally each library from sources using the latest versions
and keep the underlying - and very stable - Ubuntu8.04LTS. I don't
know whether higher-level libraries (e.g., PyMVPA) have issues with
too recent lower-level libraries (e.g., NumPy) so some limits about
too recent code could apply.

3) Add the lenny repository and have a mixed Ubuntu/Debian
installation (even though python-numpy will not be updated...).

I like to have LTS Ubuntu releases because it is up to me when someone
has problems with his/her computer here and LTS proved (at least to
me) to be really smooth. Moreover in the past I installed all those
libraries from sources and acquired some experience in that so I'd not
be much scared of option 2, even though this time is not just my
desktop/laptop and I will need to end up with some scripts for my
colleagues in order to build the full stack (almost) automatically
from sources. But is this a smart solution? About option 3 I really
never tried it extensively and anyway some basic libraries will not
upgrade, which is one of the main reasons for transitioning.

Any idea on how to handle this issue? What is your experience? What
would you suggest?

Regards,

Emanuele