[Yt-dev] EPD

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out if we can use the EPD as a basis for
installation easily -- in the past, the issue has always been HDF5.
Because we compile against HDF5, and EPD has its own that's bundled
*inside* the h5py egg, it hasn't ever been clear how to ensure that we
link against the same HDF5 for HDF5LightReader as is linked against in
h5py..  I emailed the h5py group about linkages, but it turns out they
don't encode the linkages anywhere in the python code.

Andrew from h5py suggested that ctypes might have the capabilities to
figure out the linkage information, but I wasn't able to do this.
But, I think there are only a few cases we need to consider -- linux
and OSX, really -- for linking against the EPD.  Both of these systems
have very clear mechanisms for identifying the libraries against which
a given shared library is linked.  Presupposing that we know that, we
can manipulate the path as necessary to make a *guess* at the HDF5
location.  Things are a bit more complicated if you have a non-fat
HDF5 linked against h5py, but that's something we can deal with later.

So, I was wondering: does anybody have an installation of EPD that we
could test these mechanisms on?  My machine is ... resistant to these,
because I've got libraries scattered about.  If you do have the EPD
installed, could you email me off list, and we'll test it out?

Thanks!

-Matt