Installing GSL in Windows, OSX and LINUX

Question

I want to include the GSL files in a cython program I want to build using "conda build packagename". To connect GNU GSL files with Python I am using the cython_gsl package (https://github.com/twiecki/CythonGSL). However, this requires the GSL files to be installed on each OS. Looking at the init.py file of cython_gsl, the folder which should be passed to the .pyx file is:

Windows: c:\Program Files\GnuWin32\include

OSX/Linux: os.popen('gsl-config --cflags').read()[2:-1]

Can I include downloading and installing the GSL header in the shell/batch files, so this is done automatically through "conda install packagename"?

Thank you for your help.

Also, if it is not possible, is their a python module which downloads GSL files AND allows easy connections for cython builds?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a Python module which downloads GSL files. In GNU/Linux, you can usually use your system package manager to install gsl library with the devel headers. For example, in openSUSE,

$ sudo zypper install gsl-devel

and you are done. You can install CythonGSL and it will recognize gsl and use it. (I assume it is similar in OSX.)

In Windows, it is a little bit more involved. CythonGSL will refer to LIB_GSL environmental variable for the location of gsl. (If it does not exist, then it will use the hard-coded C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\include).

Basically what you need to do is download gsl with devel headers from https://code.google.com/p/oscats/downloads/list, unpack it, create a environmental variable LIB_GSL with the location of the gsl installation, then add the bin subdirectory of the installation to your PATH environmental variable.

I have a blog post with detailed instructions: http://blog.joonro.net/en/posts/installing-gsl-and-cythongsl-in-windows.html