Bug#935785: ITP: eckit -- C++ toolkit for ECMWF tools and Applications

[Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@debian.org>

* Package name    : eckit
  Version         : 1.1.1
  Upstream Author : European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts <software@ecmwf.int>
* URL             : http://github.com/ecmwf/eckit
* License         : Apache 2
  Programming Lang: C++
  Description     : C++ toolkit for ECMWF tools and Applications

ecKit is a cross-platform c++ toolkit that supports development of tools and applications at ECMWF. It is based on code developed over the last 20 years within the MARS software and was re-factored out to be reused by other applications. It provides a an abstraction layer on top of the operating system, so it is easier to port code to new architectures. It is developed taking into account the robustness requirements of running production systems at ECMWF. The main focus is UNIX/POSIX systems, and it has been thoroughly tested on AIX, Linux and Mac OSX. Historically, the code base pre-dates and in some way can be seen as a leaner substitute for some 'Boost' libraries.

It features facilities to easily handle, in a cross-platform way:

    multi-threading
    json and yaml parsing
    object serialization and persistence
    configuration of user options and resources
    file-system abstraction
    regular expressions
    socket networking
    http protocol
    type-to-type conversions
    asynchronous IO
    asynchronous processing
    exception handling and stack dumping
    MPI object-oriented wrapper
    linear algebra abstraction with multiple backends (BLAS, MKL, Armadillo, Eigen3)
    advanced container classes
        space partition trees
        file-mapped arrays


libeckit is currently already used in several ECMWF packages on Debian (metview, odb-api) and provided in odb-api.
This will refactor it out as a shared library.