why atlas for py-scipy?

[Joshua Root]

On 2011-7-24 05:11 , Jack Howarth wrote:
>    Currently the default py26-scipy can't build on Lion due to the
> broken atlas build. Why are we defaulting to atlas or the internal
> blas/lapack? Shouldn't we simply use the system lapack/blas on
> darwin instead?
>           Jack
> ps I ask because I am in the process of reworking the pymol package
> to use py-numpy/py-scipy instead of py-numeric.

Good question. The atlas dependency in scipy seems to have been added in
<https://trac.macports.org/changeset/59617>, with the not very
sense-making commit message "Added proper deletion of default opts for
no_gcc43 and no_atlas variants."

The atlas dependency for numpy was added in
<https://trac.macports.org/changeset/59608>, also with no explanation
why in the commit message. I seem to remember there were reasons put
forward on the lists at the time, but I forget what they were.

- Josh