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

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Thomas Weber <tweber at debian.org> [2012-08-13 18:41]:

> My knowledge of hdf is pretty outdated, but afaik the serial and mpi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]

I have not looked in detail into this issue, but both libhdf5-openmpi-7
and libhdf5-mpich2-7 (the parallel versions) provide libhdf5-7 (which is
the serial version).  Unless I am getting it wrong, this kind of
relationship suggest that the packages are indeed interchangeable

> 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.

Right now, all packages that depend on libhdf5-openmpi-7 are not
co-installable with octave:

$ apt-cache rdepends libhdf5-openmpi-7
libhdf5-openmpi-7
Reverse Depends:
  python-gmsh
  libjava-gmsh2
  libgmsh2
  gmsh
  getdp
  libfeel++1
  feel++-apps
  code-aster-mpi-engine
  code-aster-engine-dbg
  code-aster-engine
  libxdmf2
  libslepc3.2
  libsiloh5-0
  libpetsc3.2
  meep-openmpi
  libmeep-openmpi6
  libmedimport0
  libmedc1
  libmed1
  libmed-tools
  libhdf5-openmpi-dev
  libhdf5-openmpi-7-dbg
  code-saturne-bin
  libcdi0
  cdo
  libadios-dev

Users of some of the packages above may wish to have Octave installed on
their systems.

> 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).

My knowledge of the buildd is quite sparse, but I would guess that this
will not happen if the solution proposed by Sébastien is adopted, because
in the alternation of the liboctave-dev dependencies
libhdf5-dev|libhdf5-openmpi-dev|libhdf5-mpich2-dev, the buildds will
always pick the first one.  Am I wrong?

Rafael