[SciPy-dev] adding LAPACK and BLAS to the source code

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

>>>>> "EJ" == eric jones <eric at enthought.com> writes:

    EJ> We just had the unpleasant experience of getting SciPy to
    EJ> build on the Sun architecture.  In the end, it didn't prove
    EJ> that hard -- it was all the mis-steps that were painful.  Most
    EJ> of SciPy builds without a hitch -- it is only the LAPACK and
    EJ> BLAS stuff that causes major problems.

Right now my biggest trouble with scipy is that it needs a recent
version of Atlas.  The version that Debian ships with is too old for
scipy.  Some of my older code does not work with scipy anymore because
my build is broken.  I already need to download too many packages from
source.  While I understand that a newer version of atlas has features
that are worth it, sometimes folks dont use the features.  By making
it mandatory to install atlas it becomes hard to use scipy.  Packaging
lapack might eliminate these problems but by sticking lapack into
scipy's CVS tree aren't we making the scipy cvs tree that much bigger?
Sticking it in CVS also means that even if the package is removed it
still lingers in the attic (which can be painful sometimes).  Also,
aren't there any other issues with including lapack in scipy?  Aren't
we in some sense forking lapack or is lapack no longer under
development??

cheers,
prabhu