Re: [PATCH 1/2] gnu: Add numpy

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

> Personally my main use of ATLAS is through numpy/scipy. Therefore I
> would like to be able to use a good performing ATLAS with those
> packages.  If that needs a manual installation step, that's fine with
> me.
>
> In principle we could make a second package and add a suffix to the
> version number such that the general binary version takes precedence.
> To get a locally built library one would then have to give an explicit
> ATLAS version to guix.  Or, do you have other approaches in mind?

Actually this is not a good idea because then, every time you update
your system, you get the slow version.

In my opinion the fact that guix makes it easy to build a package on
the user machine is really a key advantage over other package
managers/distributions, for a few, somewhat special packages, ATLAS
being one.  It would really be a pity to give up such nice a feature
to spare some build time (ca. 10 min. on my system from 2007).

Regards,
Fede