atlas, lapack, blas
Greetings! I've noticed you've taken up atlas -- great! Thank you so
much for contributing this vital service to Debian! It appears you've
done an outstanding job thus far -- congratulations!
I've downloaded your package, and have a few observations and
recommendations:
1) The package no longer seems to support runtime blas and lapack
alternatives via the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Likewise
no attempt at configuring ld.so for sane defaults on the running cpu
are attempted.
ldd /usr/bin/octave-3.2.4|grep blas
libblas.so.3gf => /usr/lib/libblas.so.3gf (0xb57f9000)
2) The tester and performance binaries are gone.
3) The package does not appear to ensure that the libraries pass the
tests before completing, nor provide the timing and testing output for
the end user to peruse.
4) There are no more build records, so that the building cpu has to
support all of the isa extensions shipped by the package. This may
prove to be no problem from a practical point of view at the present
time. It definitely was a problem at times in the past.
I haven't looked into this in much detail, and alas am too short of
time to do so. I apologize for not having enough time to keep up
with this. I'm in the middle of a book writing project, and have
underestimated the time required.
I would humbly suggest however that the trio of blas, lapack, and
atlas continue to be coordinated in a manner similar or superior to
the past, if at all possible. Ideally, one maintainer or small group
could handle all three. I am fully aware (from dear experience) that
this might require more developer time resources than are available.
However, from the users point of view, it is invaluable to be able to
run any binary against reference blas or lapack to check for errors,
as well to monitor performance gains to gauge whether a custom build
is worth the effort. Not to mention the automatic performance
enhancement of R, octave, ... without a nightmare of package
configuration options.
Somewhere I recall I have a trial 3.8 package that I could hopefully
dig up if anyone is interested in addressing these items. I'm also
quite happy to consult or answer any questions regarding the operation
of the existing system if needed.
Again, thank you all so much for the outstanding service you render
to the project.
Take care,
--
Camm Maguire camm@maguirefamily.org
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." -- Baha'u'llah
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