[Pkg-octave-devel] The future of Atlas

[Sébastien Villemot]

Sébastien Villemot <sebastien.villemot at ens.fr> writes:

> 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".

I intend to upload a new octave 3.6.2 with the above change
(i.e. recommend atlas | openblas, not the other way round). Since the
freeze should happen on June 30th, we need to move quickly, so I will
make the upload tonight unless somebody raises his her voice.

This upload will also fix the gnuplot Recommends.

-- 
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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