[Numpy-discussion] install, numpy

[Jonathan Brandmeyer]

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 10:10 -0800, Stephen Walton wrote:
> Chris Barker wrote:
> 
> > Suse is likely to provide an atlas rpm.
> 
> How?  I've struggled with trying to create ATLAS RPMs in order to 
> maintain it locally, but the rpm program doesn't have the hooks to 
> distinguish between the various architectures ATLAS supports;  it 
> distinguishes between Athlon and Pentium, for example, and an ATLAS 
> library built on the former core dumps on the latter.
> 
> It would also be nice if ATLAS could be made a shared library, but 
> that's also not supported at this time.  

ATLAS is built as a shared library in Debian, named libatlas.so.3 and
libblas.so.3.

> Without it, Numeric and 
> numarray built against ATLAS inherit its architecture dependence.  It 
> makes maintaining all of this at our site a real pain.

In Debian there are several packages that "Provide" the atlas shared
libraries (atlas3-base, atlas3-sse atlas3-sse2 atlas3-3dnow).  A
dependent package would "Depend" on the generic name.

I don't know anything about how RPM's support for "Provides" works, but
I would assume that you can manage something similar.  The preinstall
scripts for each one verify that the CPU supports the instructions used
in the package.

HTH,
-Jonathan