Presentation and some questions/remarks about numpy/scipy packages

[David Cournapeau <cournape@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am a developer of numpy and scipy, and I would be interested in
helping numpy/scipy debian packages to be better on both Debian and
Ubuntu. As a user of both Debian and Ubuntu, and one of the  main
developer working on build issues for numpy/scipy, I think I can be
useful :)

I looked at the recent debian packaging (current trunk), and I noticed
two things which I think are mistakes, or at least seem strange:

 - build-depends has a depdency on libfftw3-dev. Numpy does not use
FFTW at all, and never had to my knowledge, at least from numpy 0.9.8
(almost 3 years ago).
 - build-conflicts against atlas. I guess this is to avoid explicitely
linking against ATLAS - this can be avoided easily without the
build-conflicts which is a bit of a pain:

ATLAS=None python setup.py build

should build numpy (and scipy) without ATLAS, even if atlas is detected.

cheers,

David