[Visualpython-users] new beta release

[Bruce S. <Bru...@nc...>]

At http://sourceforge.net/projects/visualpython there is 4.beta8 for 
Windows and Linux/Unix.

The big change is that this incorporates the work of Arthur Siegel to 
use the new numpy and eliminate dependence on Numeric, which is no 
longer supported.

There are three major known bugs still being worked on, somewhat 
different from the previous release:

    1) On Windows, programs that process mouse events may leave a copy
    of python running after clicking the close box. The example program
    toroid_drag.py has this problem.

    2) On some Windows machines, the animation in the program gas.py is
    very jerky; this is the only example program affected in this way.

    3) Graphing (from visual.graph import *) works well for many simple
    uses, but if the axes must be continually adjusted it can be very
    slow. If you know the extent of your variables and can specify xmax
    and ymax for the graph, the graphing is very fast.

This version is much more usable on Windows, because mouse events now 
seem to work okay while running, thanks to a workaround by Arthur 
Siegel. However, there remains a mouse-related problem with quitting. 
Arthur has narrowed the problem down to being associated with situations 
like the following:

if scene.mouse.events:
   m = scene.mouse.getevent()

One way to track the quit problem on Windows is to press Ctrl-Alt-Del, 
choose Processes tab, click on Image Name, and scroll to python. If 
you're running IDLE, normally there is one copy of python for IDLE 
itself, another copy for the shell, and a third copy for the running 
program (though oddly enough if you run a program and wait about ten 
seconds you may see the third listing disappear).

Issues on Linux: When I compiled and installed Python 2.5, numpy 1.0, 
and Visual into /usr/local on Ubuntu, I found that at the start of every 
run I get a warning message (which doesn't prevent running), "Python C 
API version mismatch for module cvisual: This Python has API version 
1013, module cvisual has version 1012." Through Google I've seen many 
references to this exact same warning, with the same version numbers, 
but no enlightenment.

When I tried to build against Ubuntu packages for Python 2.5 and numpy 
1.0 (in /usr), the configuration failed in a way I don't understand, 
with the check for the existence of numpy looking in 
/usr/local/lib/Python2.5/site-packages/numpy instead of in 
/usr/lib/Python2.5/site-packages/numpy, despite other indications in 
config.log that it knew that I'd specified --prefix=/usr.

Any help in testing and debugging would be most welcome!

Bruce Sherwood