[pymvpa] Why no PyPI?

[Ben Acland]

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        
> 
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