[Visualpython-users] enthought

[James M. <mu...@pi...>]

Congratulations on finally getting the new visual to release candidate  
stage!

Next term I will be teaching a comp methods course with python, and I  
plan to have the students install the Enthought Python Distribution.   
With this they will have numpy, scipy, matplotlib, etc., with an easy  
installation for windows or mac (and some distros of linux).  Now it  
would be nice to show them the visual module as well, so that leads to  
my question,
how do I get visual 5 to play nice with the enthought setup?  On my  
mac I see that you want the MacPython version of python installed, and  
then vpython installs numpy and visual on top of that.  So now I have  
two python distributions (well three if you count  the system version  
for the mac), one contains numpy and visual, while the other contains  
all the great enthought modules. In order to merge these into one  
distribution, do I need to recompile visual by itself and distributer  
that to my students or is this even possible?  I can try plying with  
the python path and seeing if the two can play together, but if I use  
visual, I need to come up with a simple method for my students to add  
it in. (After all the reason for using enthought is to make it simple  
for the students.)

I assume that the final version of visual 5 won't be ready for the  
start of the term, so I will start them with numpy, scipy and  
matplotlib, and if I can figure out an easy way to add in visual  
later, I will do that.  Any advice on how to proceed with that would  
be welcome.

-Jim Mueller