[DebianGIS-dev] How to use libhdf5-serial-dev and -mpi/-lam friends correctly?

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 11:17:46PM +0200, Thomas Weber wrote:
> > I see no reasons why mpi.h has to be included but for the case you
> > are using one of the -mpi flavors. In that case you should depend
> > on libhdf5-mpi-dev. I don't undestand why you are trying to use
> > both -serial and -parallel flavors.
> 
> Both -serial and parallel flavors are used due to users' demand:
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=231114
> It has been like this for at least 6 years (I don't use any of the hdf5
> features of Octave). 
> It used to work all the time without problems; or maybe there were
> problems all the time and nobody noticed, who knows.
> 

I think this is due to the present version of hdf5. As said in the
related bug report, currently HDF5 upstream simply does not support
correctly (at least IMHO) parallel and serial flavor and Debian
never did that. So the only way to do that is providing an embedded
serial/parallel.

> Anyway, I don't mind dropping the parallel hdf5 support if that's the
> easiest way forward. Do you see another way?
> 

Honestly not, but for pushing HDF5 team - already done - about things like
that. Unfortunately this is a quite cornet case: most projects use
serial xor parallel flavors. As explained, diverging from upstream
would be out of question: it would require patching for ever
both hdf5 and all reverse dependencies (at least for parallel support).

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine