[Pkg-octave-devel] liboctave-dev insists on serial version of the hdf5 library

[Thomas Weber]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:29:35AM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> I would really like to hear Thomas' views on this issue, since he is the
> one who took the decision to switch to the serial only version. He may
> be aware of issues that we are overlooking.

My knowledge of hdf is pretty outdated, but afaik the serial and mpi
versions are not interchangeable: the serial version can do things the
parallel version cannot.[1]
You might want to ask Sylvestre about it, as he said that he needed the
serial version for Scilab. I found the ability to have both Octave and 
Scilab on a system more important than an octave-forge package.

One of the things that might be a blocker: depending on the installed
flavor of hdf5 on a buildd, Octave will link against a different
library. This might mean that we run into library transitions for Octave
without even knowing it (like, build #1 is linked against the serial
version and the next build #2 is linked against the parallel version).

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/591346

	Thomas