Re: QUERY: what is status/recommendations for Octave + ATLAS compilation

[John W. Eaton]

On  7-Mar-2000, Steven G. Johnson <address@hidden> wrote:

| I made [my patch] against the current CVS development tree because I
| wanted to make it easier for JWE to incorporate into the official
| version if he wanted to.  At this point, I'm not sure how he feels
| about that; he hasn't really said anything to me about it.

As I see it, ATLAS will definitely be available in some future version
of Octave.  The only question is whether it should be optional.  I'm
leaning toward making it the default.  If it is the default, then the
question is how to modify the Octave distribution to accomodate that.
Since ATLAS doesn't provide everything from LAPACK that Octave needs,
it makes the installation a bit strange.  The current scheme of
building the LAPACK library and then building ATLAS and overwriting
parts of the LAPACK library seems a bit awkward to me.

When I install software, I don't like having to round up several
different tar files from various locations and install them in a
specific order.  (I realize that people already have to do that with
gnuplot, but it is a separate program, not linked to Octave).  I much
prefer being able to get one tar file and then install a package with
a simple `untar; configure; make; make install'.  So I think it would
be better to include ATLAS with Octave and build it along with the
rest of Octave.

I suppose this could cause some (minor) trouble when a new version of
ATLAS is released in between releases of Octave.  But that is not
really much different than the situation that we currently have with
other libraries (LAPACK, readline, kpathsearch, etc.).  If things
haven't changed too much in one of those libraries, it should be
possible to just drop the new version in and go on.  So if someone
really wanted to use an updated version of ATLAS before it is included
in the Octave distribution, they could.

jwe



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