This file gives an overview of what is necessary to build binary releases for NumPy on OS X. Windows binaries are built here using Wine, they can of course also be built on Windows itself. Building OS X binaries on another platform is not possible.

Current build and release info

The current info on building and releasing NumPy and SciPy is scattered in several places. It should be summarized in one place, updated and where necessary described in more detail. The sections below list all places where useful info can be found.

Source tree

  • INSTALL.txt
  • release.sh
  • pavement.py

NumPy Trac

SciPy.org wiki

Doc wiki

Supported platforms and versions

Python 2.4-2.6 are the currently supported versions on all platforms. NumPy 1.5 and 2.0 should include support for Python 2.7 and >=3.1.

OS X

OS X 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) are supported for the 1.4.x releases. Note that only the Python from python.org is supported. Binaries do not support Apple Python.

Windows

Windows XP and Windows Vista are supported by the 1.3.0 release, the 1.4.x releases also support Windows 7.

Linux

Many distributions include NumPy. Building from source is also relatively straightforward. Only tarballs are created for Linux, no specific binary installers are provided (yet).

BSD / Solaris

No binaries are provided, but succesful builds on Solaris and BSD have been reported.

Tool chain

Compilers

The same gcc version is used as the one with which Python itself is built on each platform. At the moment this means:

  • OS X uses gcc 4.0
  • Windows build uses latest released version from MinGW, now at 3.4.5.

Cython >= 0.12 is needed.

Fortran: on OS X gfortran from this site is used. On Windows g77 (included in MinGW) is the current default, in the future this may shift to gfortran as well.

Python

Building docs

  • Sphinx
  • numpydoc
  • Matplotlib
  • Texlive (or MikTeX on Windows)

Wine

For building Windows binaries on OS X Wine can be used. In Wine the following needs to be installed:

  • Python 2.5
  • Python 2.6
  • MakeNsis
  • CpuId plugin for MakeNsis : this can be found in the NumPy source tree under tools/win32build/cpucaps and has to be built with MinGW (see SConstruct file in that dir for details)
  • MinGW
  • ATLAS, 3x ([No SSE, SSE2, SSE3] for superpack installer) : ATLAS does not compile under wine or on Windows out of the box. Binaries for ATLAS can be found in svn under vendor/.

To install Wine on OS X Snow Leopard the current options are to compile a current unstable version ,`<http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/Building>`_, or to use an install script from here. For me, the former option did not work (everything compiled, but after installing Python the command import tempfile resulted in an exception. The latter option did work.

After successful installation and an invocation of the wine executable, a ~/.wine folder exists - new programs will be installed there in ~/.wine/drive_c. Installing Windows programs with .exe executables is done by running

$ wine yourprog.exe

and MSI installers can be installed with

$ msiexec /i yourprog.msi

For the above to work you probably need to put the wine-1.x.x/bin directory in your PATH.

To install MinGW, the easiest option is to use the automated installer on the MinGW download page. This will give you (at this moment) GCC 3.4.5; GCC 4.x is still not supported officially by MinGW.

To be able to use gcc and MakeNsis in Wine, the locations of gcc.exe and makensis.exe should be added to the Windows environment variable PATH. This can easily be done by running

$ wine regedit

add adding a PATH variable in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Environment.

Virtualenv

Virtualenv is a very useful tool to keep several versions of packages around. It is also used in the Paver script to build the docs. The use of the --no-site-packages option in the Paver script is probably not necessary, and may prevent successful building of the docs. If doc building fails because Matplotlib can not be found, remove this option.

What is released

Binaries

Windows binaries in "superpack" form for Python 2.5 and 2.6. A superpack contains three builds, for SSE2, SSE3 and no SSE.

OS X binaries are made in dmg format, targeting only the Python from python.org

For Python 2.4 binaries are not built. It should be checked however that the source release works with Python 2.4.

Other

  • Release Notes
  • Changelog

Source distribution

A source release in both .zip and .tar.gz formats is released.

Release process

Check the buildbot

The buildbot is located at http://buildbot.scipy.org/.

Make sure current trunk builds a package correctly

python setup.py bdist
python setup.py sdist

To actually build the binaries after everything is set up correctly, the release.sh script can be used. For details of the build process itself it is best to read the pavement.py script.

Note

The following steps are repeated for the beta(s), release candidates(s) and the final release.

Check deprecations

Before the release branch is made, it should be checked that all deprecated code that should be removed is actually removed, and all new deprecations say in the dostring or deprecation warning at what version the code will be removed.

Check the release notes

Check that the release notes are up-to-date, and mention at least the following: - major new features - deprecated and removed features - supported Python versions - for SciPy, supported NumPy version(s) - outlook for the near future

Create the release "tag"

svn cp http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/trunk http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/tags/<version>

Update the version of the trunk

Increment the release number in setup.py. Release candidates should have "rc1" (or "rc2", "rcN") appended to the X.Y.Z format.

Update the version of the tag

Switch to the tag:

svn switch http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/tags/<version>

Set release=True in setup.py.

Make the release

The tar-files and binary releases for distribution should be uploaded to SourceForge, together with the Release Notes and the Changelog. Uploading can be done through a web interface or, more efficiently, through scp/sftp/rsync as described in the SourceForge upload guide. For example:

scp <filename> <username>,numpy@frs.sourceforge.net:/home/frs/project/n/nu/numpy/NumPy/<releasedir>/

Update PyPi

The final release (not betas or release candidates) should be uploaded to PyPi. There are two ways to update PyPi, the first one is:

$ python setup.py sdist upload

and the second one is to upload the PKG_INFO file inside the sdist dir in the web interface of PyPi. The source tarball can also be uploaded through this interface. A simple binary installer for windows, created with bdist_wininst, should also be uploaded to PyPi so easy_install numpy works.

Update scipy.org

A release announcement with a link to the download site should be placed in the sidebar of the front page of scipy.org.

Announce to the lists

The release should be announced on the mailing lists of NumPy and SciPy, to python-announce, and possibly also those of Matplotlib,IPython and/or Pygame.

During the beta/RC phase an explicit request for testing the binaries with several other libraries (SciPy/Matplotlib/Pygame) should be posted on the mailing list.