Installing Python Software Packages: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

I almost gave the following presentation at the INFORMS Annual Meeting:


That is, I was scheduled to give this talk but my session co-organizer ran over and I had to summarize these slides in 5 minutes!

Anyway, these slides describe different strategies for installing Python software.  Although I am a big fan of Python software development, robust strategies for software installation remains a challenge.  This talk describes several different installation scenarios:

The Good: the user has administrative privileges
  1. Installing on Windows with an installer executable
  2. Installing with Linux application utility
  3. Installing a Python package from the PyPI repository
  4. Installing a Python package from source

The Bad: the user does not have administrative privileges
  1. Using a virtual environment to isolate package installations
  2. Using an installer executable on Windows with a virtual environment

    The Ugly: the user needs to install an extension package from source
    1. Installing a Python extension package from source
    2. PyCoinInstall – Managing builds for Python extension packages
    The last item referring to PyCoinInstall describes a utility being developed for the COIN-OR software, which is used within the operations research community.  COIN-OR includes a variety of Python and C++ software packages, and this script uses a simple plug-in system to support the management of package builds and installation.  Of course, this mostly does the easy packages right now...

    While preparing these slides I realized that the vpy_install script I use for setting up virtual environments is probably of broader interest.  I'll say more about this in a little bit.  In the meantime, checkout the slides!

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    Python Plugin Frameworks

    Updated to include pointers to the PyUtilib Component Architecture and PnP. Various Python projects I am working on could benefit from the use of a Plug-in framework.  However, there does not appear to be a standard Python plug-in framework, though there are some mature packages that support plug-ins. Here's a summary of my recent web research: yapsy - This is a simple plug-in framework that was designed specifically to support plug-ins with no external dependencies. Mary Alchin describes a simple plugin framework , with a similar goal.  His classes provide an API for the plugins, with few supporting features (e.g. searching for plugins). André Roberge has a series of posts that describe the application of plugins to refactor a simple calculator application.  The goal of this is to illustrate the requirements for plugin frameworks, with the goal of identifying best practices for plugins. There are some interesting replies to this post, which consider implementations of the
    Read more

    Using AsciiDoc for Mathematical Publications

    Technical writing is an integral part of my research in computer science and operations research. I have a long history using LaTeX, which is very well suited for writing technical articles that contain mathematical equations as well as code snippets. Although LaTeX can readily generate postscript and PDF output files, I have been unimpressed with tools that generate HTML from LaTeX source. Thus, I was intrigued by AsciiDoc , which promises to generate PDF, HTML and eBook formats. AsciiDoc is used to provide online documentation for software projects, and authors can publish book through O'Rielly using this tool. Thus, this is a well-developed document generation tool. I have successfully prototyped a draft book, Getting Started with Coopr , and you can browse the subversion repository for this document here . Note that the Makefile file specifies build targets for PDF, HTML and eBook files. The advantage of AsciiDoc is that you can use a simple markup language to generate
    Read more

    A Different Model for Writing Blog Posts

    This is a blog that I have been meaning to write for some time.   I occasionally take a look at the download statistics for this blog, and recently I was prompted to do this by other bloggers who were reporting their end-of-year statistics (e.g. see Laura McLay’s review of the Punk Rock OR blog ). Unlike Laura, I do not have impressive download statistics to report about the many blogs I have written in 2011; frankly, I did not create many posts. However, an interesting pattern has emerged regarding this blog’s readership:   there are a few key blog posts that are frequently downloaded.   For example, my most frequently downloaded blog post is a survey of Python plugin software, which I wrote in 2009.   I suspect that other bloggers have seen the same thing; they have a few posts that are very popular because people do web searches on that topic.   However, it is worth stepping back and thinking about the implications of this when writing a blog. When I first started b
    Read more