This directory contains the sources and tools necessary for building mandatory
dependencies of numpy/lapack, with a special focus on Windows.

The directory is organized as followed:
        * src: sources of the dependencies
        * tools: various scripts to build the binaries of the dependencies

In Particular, the tools directory contains:
        * a build.py script to build blas/lapack on Win32 from a configuration
        file.
        * basic.nsi: a NSIS script to build an installer for blas/lapack under
        different architectures.

The build.py tool
=================

dependencies:
-------------

cygwin with make, gcc, g77 and python

How to use:
-----------

python tools/build.py tools/sse3.cfg

Will build a blas/lapack using configuration in tools/sse3.cfg. In particular,
it contains informations on whether to build atlas or not, which fortran
compiler to use, etc...

The basic.nsi script
====================

You need NSIS to use it: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page You also need a
small plugin cpu_caps, to tell NSIS wether the running CPU supports SSE2,
SSE3, etc...

It will look for binaries in the binaries directory: one directory per arch. A
subdir mingw32 is used for differentiatin with the not-yet supported Win64.

Note
----

Although the binaries themselves have to be built on windows (ATLAS is not
cross-compilable AFAIK), the installer itself can be built under linux. Debian
contains nsis ported on Linux:

makensis tools/basic.nsis

CAVEATS
=======

The build.py script is really basic. It does not handle failure well, and it
may be difficult to interrupt (windows indiosyncraties wrt process management
and lack of signals do not help; add cygwin on the top of it to make things
more complex).

The only solution I can see would be to use ctypes to use windows specific
ProcessTerminate. To stop atlas build is not easy either: even from cygwin
shell, you cannot stop it easily. The easiest way I am aware of is to kill the
AtlasTee.exe process (from cygwin or from the windows TaksManager).

For this reason, for now, the build.py always starts from scratch. A better
solution would be to use a build system like rake or scons. But rake would mean
more dependencies, and scons is too slow.