[pymvpa] Why no PyPI?

[Ben Acland]

I am going to take the time to do a deeper investigation of buildout. It looks like a potential winner. If it checks out, I'll build a recipe for my lab, check it on a few platforms, then post back here if it's worthwhile.

Ben

On Feb 17, 2013, at 4:34 PM, Ben Acland <benacland at gmail.com> wrote:

> Homebrew formulas require tests, which can be more or less extensive. You can run them after installing by calling `brew test foo`, but they're just ruby methods, so conceivably you could just call them as the final step of installation. Actually... I don't think it'd be that easy. There's an easy way to find out... let me test this out on a formula I'm working on right now (for shogun).
> 
> Nope, it's not that easy. Of course after establishing that, it's clear why. Won't put the boring details here. The orthodox approach would be to put in the instructions "please call `brew test pymvpa` immediately after installing". Another approach would be to call `setup.py test` from within the install command, which might well work.
> 
> Downside... homebrew only covers mac, and I'm after something cross-platform here.
> 
> As for pip... a couple people have tried to get the pip folks to make it a little more CPAN like (viz. run tests prior to installation), and there's even a branch out there that does it, but as of yet it's not part of the main branch. Might be dead in the water.
> 
> As for any package I know of... there is buildout (http://www.buildout.org/), which lets you run pretty much anything you want as part of installation (being a full build system)... but I'm not an expert on it, and apparently maintenance can be a bit of a chore. On the upside, it does share with the pip+virtualenv approach the benefit of providing an isolated environment, which gets at one of the main issues I'm trying to address with all this bothersome questioning and probing: setting up and protecting your environment on a shared resource where you might not have sudo privileges. Granted, there are problems to achieving that fully when it comes to installing the non-python dependencies. Buildout might warrant further investigation. It's the only one of the options so far that seems to be cross-platform-ish, capable of installing non-python dependencies, and capable of running unit tests as part of installation. But again, no buildout expert here, so these advantages might crumble under closer inspection.
> 
> Ben
> 
> On Feb 17, 2013, at 1:43 PM, Yaroslav Halchenko <debian at onerussian.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Sun, 17 Feb 2013, Ben Acland wrote:
>>>   See, I knew I was stepping in it :).
>>>   I think I can handle that. Pip only does python stuff, of course, but that
>>>   covers the must-haves and the strong recommendations. For the optionals,
>>>   there's a way to define external requirements, and print a warning saying,
>>>   "you should really consider installing this." I found a decent example of
>>>   something that might be acceptable in the python module Shapely. See this
>>>   gist for an example of what happens when you try to install it without a c
>>>   library that makes it run faster:
>>>   [1]https://gist.github.com/beOn/4970435
>>>   Would that kind of behavior be acceptable? 
>> 
>> I think so... the only hard requirement is numpy, then very desirable is
>> scipy () + nose (for testing) + matplotlib (for plotting)
>> and then everything else from the link I have provided ;-)
>> 
>> btw -- does any package you know finishes "installation" by unit-testing 
>> the beast?  imho it would be nice as well if pymvpa gets tested as
>> installed, and in case of failure -- output of mvpa2.wtf() would be
>> provided -- this could greatly simplify any needed troubleshooting and
>> would prevent (delayed) problems with deployed pymvpa
>> 
>>> If so... yeah, I think I can
>>>   take this on. Otherwise, I'll at least be happy to write a homebrew
>>>   formula, but pip wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.
>> -- 
>> Yaroslav O. Halchenko
>> http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
>> Postdoctoral Fellow,   Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
>> Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
>> Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
>> WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik        
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pkg-ExpPsy-PyMVPA mailing list
>> Pkg-ExpPsy-PyMVPA at lists.alioth.debian.org
>> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-exppsy-pymvpa
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-exppsy-pymvpa/attachments/20130218/f883af8b/attachment.html>