Re: [Pysparse-developers] Compiling pysparse for Windows

[Dominique O. <dom...@gm...>]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Roman Geus <rom...@gm...> wrote:
> Hello
>
> Triggered by a recent email on the pysparse-users list I tried to
> compile pysparse 1.1 for Windows and Python 2.6.
>
> I used Visual C++ (Express Edition) and the latest ACML for BLAS and
> LAPACK (both are available for free).
>
> Except for the superlu package (which I skipped) only a few changes to
> the source code were necessary (mostly due to the lack of C99 support in
> the MS C compiler) to build the modules.
>
> Unfortunately one of the unit tests in spmatrix_test failed, but
> basically it seemed to work. (Later I saw that the same unit test also
> fails on Linux, so it might be a general problem.)
>
> I have two questions:
>
> Do you know of anybody who has successfully built pysparse using Visual
> C++ recently?
>
> Do you think it would be desirable to be able to build using Visual C++
> or is build process using MinGW straight-forward and sufficient?
>
> Best regards,
> Roman

I will let Windows users comment on what would best suit their needs.
In the meantime I commented out the test that fails. The reason is
that when I implemented fancy indexing (which includes slicing), I
decided that taking a slice on a matrix would result by default in a
non-symmetric matrix, even if the original matrix was symmetric.
Clearly, only symmetric slices would yield a symmetric submatrix
(although special cases may occur but would be costly to check for).
Currently, Pysparse doesn't check for symmetric slices.

-- 
Dominique