[yt-dev] yt-3.0 on Windows

[John ZuHone]

Hi all,

Because I enjoy weeping and gnashing of teeth, I've spent some time off and on over the last few weeks attempting to get yt working on Windows. This turned out to be easier than I had anticipated using conda, but still kind of miserable. 

In any case, we have something that does work on Windows, but on x86 only at the moment. This is because something is screwy with the way Anaconda builds HDF5 and h5py on Windows (both x86 and x86_64), and I had to use the binary version of h5py compiled for Windows to get it to work. The latter is only 32-bit. 

I've been able to do some basic operations on objects, and make some PlotWindow plots. What I know doesn't work so far:

1) I couldn't get png_writer to compile, and as I recall we are probably going to dump this soon(?), so it's currently not built. 

2) Halo finding doesn't work because the modules depend on some header file that Windows doesn't have. We might be able to make this work at some point, though. 

3) Reason

If you have a Windows x86 box sitting around and you're curious, please play around with it. Here's how to get it working:

1) Get the Windows x86 version of miniconda here: http://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda-2.2.3-Windows-x86.exe

2) Once you've installed it, download the binary version of h5py for 32-bit Windows and Python 2.7 here: https://code.google.com/p/h5py/downloads/list

When you install this, you have the option of pointing it to the Python distribution that Miniconda installed. 

3) From the command prompt, install yt by issuing:

conda install yt -c http://conda.binstar.org/jzuhone

which should pick up the rest of the necessary packages, but you should also use conda to install IPython, Mercurial, and the like. 

4) If you want to develop, fork my fork:

http://bitbucket.org/jzuhone/yt-windows

the command to develop with a yt source directory is slightly different, it has to be:

python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32 develop

also issue this from the command line before you build:

set PNG_DIR = c:\{path to your miniconda directory}\Library

The only "box" I have at the moment is a virtual machine on my laptop that isn't exactly a good testing platform, so if someone has a box somewhere where they'd like to set up testing that'd be great. I'm also going to see if there's something here at Goddard I can log into to use. 

Once we're satisfied that most things aren't breaking too badly I'll issue a PR from my fork. 

Best, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays,

John Z

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