Re: [gentoo-science] blas/lapack status

[Donnie Berkholz]

Sebastien Fabbro wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> While I have been trying to so some ebuilds depending on blas and
> lapack, I collected a number of thoughts regarding their implementation
> in Gentoo:
>
> * Gentoo doc:
> Mentioned in a year-old post on this list, there is this site:
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/science/blas-lapack.xml
> Is it still up to date? It is not referred anywhere on the Gentoo web
> sites.

Maybe. =) Feel free to provide a patch to help update it.

> * eselect: although eselect seems the way to go, it not yet fully
> functional. As I was working on the mkl ebuild, I found out it is not
> possible to add a new blas/lapack implementation without changing the
> eselect sources. As an example, mkl-7.2 is supported, but not in
> portage, and outdated. Also eselect blas/lapack do not yet provide a
> mechanism to show library directories and include directories. Something
> like "eselect blas show cflags"? Am I missing something?

I've just decided to start working on this. I wrote an ebuild last night
for Goto BLAS, which provided the motivation to fix this setup.

> * Should we really keep those obsolete packages:
>  - sci-libs/atlas: now decomposed as sci-libs/blas-atlas and
> sci-libs/lapack-atlas
>  - sci-libs/blas: redundant with sci-libs/blas-reference
>  - sci-libs/lapack: redundant with sci-libs/lapack-reference

But take a look at the keywords. Although it does look like we can
remove atlas since {blas,lapack}-atlas are stable on the same keywords,
we can't do so for blas and lapack yet because *-reference aren't stable
on (blas) x86 s390 ppc64 (lapack) x86 or ~arch on (lapack) ppc64.

> * cblas/clapack: as mentioned in a previous post, at least a
> virtual/cblas could help (as well as a cblas-reference) ebuild.

cblas-reference seems to have appeared at some point in the past couple
of months.

> * documentation: shouldn't blas/lapack install man pages and quick
> references as well as in Fedora (or may be an app-docs/lapack)?

Sounds useful. Got a patch?

Thanks,
Donnie