[Deb-scipy-devel] Bug#413160: python-numpy: Dependency hell

[Ed Schofield]

On 3/6/07, Marco Presi <zufus at zufus.org> wrote:
>
> About the circular deps, I am going to make a new upload to fix it.
>
> Regarding the point to have numpy to depend on numpy-dev: we didn't find
> a simple solution to avoid this.
>
> numpy-dev contains some headers and dev stuff that is needed by f2py.
> Now, f2py (that comes with python-numpy), needs those haeders (so we
> need to have numpy-dev as a dependency of numpy). On the other hand if
> we would include the contents of numpy-dev inside numpy.. we would ship
> some devel stuff inside a package that shoudn't contain it..
>
> In previous releases, I set numpy-dev as reccomended by numpy. But after
> a bug opened against this solution, we eventually decided to add this
> dependency.
>
> ..if you have suggestions, you are more than welcome.


Hi Marco,

Here's my suggestion:

The numpy package should not depend on numpy-dev; this defeats the purpose
of having a separate -dev package, which is to keep the filesystem
uncluttered for users who don't need the dev headers. But in this case there
are only two meaningful files in the -dev package:

/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/numpy/f2py/src/fortranobject.h
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/numpy/f2py/src/fortranobject.c

Since at least the .h file is necessary for the functioning of numpy, these
should just be moved to the numpy package and the -dev package should be
removed entirely. The usual Debian package / package-dev distinction makes
no sense for this package.

-- Ed
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