Re: how to do science with amd64 lenny

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 06:05:05PM +0200, Francesco Pietra wrote:
> Hello:
> For computational chemistry on the stable amd64 I needed yesterday
> MPICH2. As the deb package is only in testing, I compiled MPICH2 for
> stable, but the parallelized program needs python2.6, only available
> in testing. I doubt I am able enough to compile python.
> 
> I can't move to testing because I am not allowed to do that not only
> for the risk of testing distributions for computational work but also
> because older key computational package do not run on testing.
> 
> Question: would installing python2.6 on lenny from unstable be safe
> enough by using apt-pinning? I have no system expert here. I would be
> responsible for damage to the software.
> 
> Otherwise, do you know a distribution of linux that overcomes such
> problems by making some key recent packages available for their stable
> version? I could suggest to move to that because of recurring problems
> for us.

I would consider moving python2.6 likely more risky than simply moving
to testing entirely.

No distribution can provide recent packages for stable releases because
then it isn't stable anymore.  Too many other dependancies end up having
to be pulled in in many cases.

Either you want stable, or you want current.  You can not have both.

Now in this case, a question to consider is: Does it actually need python
2.6 or not?  If it doesn't then you can probably just compile the one
package you want for stable.

I just compiled and installed mpich2 (from unstable) on a system running
stable, and installed it.  No complaint about that.  So if it requires
python2.6, the package certainly doesn't enforce that.

I just got the source package and did:

dpkg-source -x mpich2_1.2.1.1-4.dsc
cd mpich2-1.2.1.1
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -D
apt-get install <list of whatever packages the above said was missing for building dependancies>
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b
cd ..
dpkg -i *1.2.1.1-4*deb

I have no idea how to test if it works of course.

-- 
Len Sorensen