I am not convinced that those potential problems are a show-stopper.
Your package manager will keep numpy reasonably up to date so that you
will (in all reasonable cases) already have that dependency satisfied.
For packages managed by your package manager you never need to run
--upgrade (I have certainly never used pip --upgrade on anything).

However, I am not feeling so strongly about this that I could not live
with Anaconda as option 1 for everybody, if that's what you prefer.

On 04/11/2013 09:29 AM, Tom Aldcroft wrote:

I would say we should put package managers for people with Linux root
as a close second, but not actually equivalent to the first option of
Anaconda for people that just want to run scientific Python as quickly
as possible with the least hassle. The problem is that to get up and
running with package managers there is a growing list of useful
packages that you need to know about and install. Of course that isn't
a problem, but it's a bit more hassle than just download a file, bash
, set path.

I also think it's a very bad idea to touch the system python as root,
especially as a beginner. I talked to Terry yesterday and he had a
horror story of completely munging his mac system python. Even though
many useful things are available as distro packages, not all of them
are (e.g. astropy), so very soon users need to start installing
packages with |sudo pip install ..|. Not infrequently the setup.py
files can specify dependencies, for instance if you do |--upgrade| on
some packages it will try to upgrade your numpy! It's only a matter of
time before something in the system gets screwed up. So then you need
to launch into teaching people how to properly use virtualenv, or
|--user| (which has other problems).

So what about "If you really know what you are doing, package managers
are a good option".

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#7 (comment).

Uh oh!

Add Anaconda and make it primary "quick install" recommendation #7

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