[Pkg-octave-devel] The future of Atlas

[Sébastien Villemot]

Thomas Weber <tweber at debian.org> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 10:28:15PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
>> I have been discussing this issue with Sylvestre Ledru, the maintainer
>> of atlas. Even though he has not made a decision yet, he is now
>> considering the possibility of removing atlas from the archive. I am
>> going to help him maintain the package but I am not sure that we can
>> solve the various issues. Especially there are FTBFS on several release
>> architectures and upstream seems not willing to help.
>
> I've skimmed the SourceForge mailing list and I think the issue is more
> along the lines of "he is way too busy for keeping ATLAS at least
> somewhat buildable on what feels like 100+ architectures".

There is good news: I managed to fix the FTBFS of ATLAS. It is now
almost in a releasable state.

>> All in all, it is becoming likely that we will have to change the
>> Recommends field of octave from atlas to openblas. This may even have to
>> be done for Wheezy.
>
> Hmm, I think Sylvestre should clarify that with the release team. I
> don't think they will object (at least for Octave, it doesn't change
> anything in the build), but I'd rather get their OK for that *now*. 

The Release Team is aware of some issues around BLAS/LAPACK. I hope they
will accept the migration of the new set of packages (refblas,
reflapack, atlas, openblas).

Even though I am now confident that ATLAS will be part of Wheezy, I
think we still need to decide if and how we change the Recommends field
of Octave.

I think we have to choose between the two alternatives:
- libatlas3-base | libopenblas-base
- libopenblas-base | libatlas3-base

On one hand it makes sense to put openblas first because it seems faster
and its alternative has higher priority. On the other hand maybe we want
to keep ATLAS first because it is more tested.

Also, we have to take #598638 into account. Basically, if one installs
both openblas and ATLAS and leaves all alternatives in automatic mode,
then LAPACK is broken. The issue seems difficult to solve and I am not
sure it will be fixed for Wheezy. Basically we would need hooks in
update-alternatives to solve this, but this is not yet implemented
(#521813).

Hence, if we recommend openblas first, then most of our users may end up
with openblas and ATLAS installed at the same time and be hit by the
bug. Of course there is an easy workaround (manually update the
alternatives) but this will confuse many users.

The conservative choice seems "libatlas3-base | libopenblas-base".

What do you think?

-- 
Sébastien Villemot
Researcher in Economics & Debian Maintainer
http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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