[Pkg-scicomp-devel] new packages in the repository

[Ondrej Certik]

Hi,

I added the following packages into the repository:

1) tetgen

The package is ready for upload to Debian non-free. Let me know if you
find any problems with it and I'll try to fix it.

2) openmx

The package builds, but:

  * uscan doesn't yet work
  * it is compiling without optimizations, so that the edit&debug&fix
cycle is faster, this should be fixed once the package is ready for
upload
  * the man page should be improved
  * examples should be adapted to work more easily in Debian (at least
some of them) and copied to /usr/share/doc/openmx/examples (see
README.Debian for more info)

3) slepc

The package compiles, but:

  * uscan doesn't work, because it is not easy to download the tarball
from the upstream pages (you need to agree to the license first).
Don't know how to fix it.
  * the upstream makefile is broken, it produces "libslepc.", the fix
is commented out in debian/rules, needs to be adapted and polished
  * after fixing the above, the examples compile and link, but
segfault. Find the problem and fix it the problem is with moving the
libraries to /usr/lib, because when I install SLEPc locally, it works
  * when the above things are fixed, make SLEPc build with arpack, and
possibly other solvers in debian/main (LAPACK and others, see below),
see the commented line in debian/rules for configuring with arpack
  * another problem with arpack is that it needs to be compiled
against lapack version 2, not 3, because then it doesn't work
correctly (produces incorrect results or freezes). lapack2 is no
longer in debian, so we will probably have to include the sources in
the arpack package (or introduce lapack2 package again).

Other questions:
--------------

It will take some time before the above packages hit unstable, but I
need them now. Let's say that the tetgen (1.4.2-1) will be uploaded
soon to incoming. Can I just create versions like 1.4.2-1oc1,
1.4.2-1oc2, etc. that will be updates to the package during the time
tetgen is in incoming (and I put the binary package into my
repository, so that it upgrades nicely on all my computers with
debian) and when tetgen gets into unstable, I will just add 1.4.2-2 to
the changelog (and leave the 1oc1, 1oc2 there) and this 1.4.2-2 will
be uploaded to unstable? So that the most recent version of the
package is in the alioth svn.

I would also be interested in packaging these eigenvalue solvers in
the future (when we get the SLEPc working reliably in Debian):

BLZPACK: http://crd.lbl.gov/~osni/marques.html#BLZPACK
PRIMME: http://www.cs.wm.edu/~andreas/software/

they will go to the main section. The primme should be better than
arpack in most of the cases. And then possibly compiling SLEPc against
them as well. Possibly also

TRLan: http://crd.lbl.gov/~kewu/trlan.html
BLOPEX: http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~aknyazev/software/BLOPEX/

But I am not sure about the license if it could go into main.

Ondrej