[SciPy-dev] Building on Woody(Debian): good news, bad news.

[Pearu Peterson]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2002, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

> I get an error saying atlas libs cant be found.  They are very much
> installed.  I looked at the code and it seems that the code looks for
> liblapack, libf77blas, libcblas, libatlas all in either /usr/lib/atlas
> or /usr/local/lib/atlas (or a user specified directory).  Under debian
> these libraries all exist but are not in /usr/lib/atlas.  The cblas,
> f77blas and atlas libs are in /usr/lib the others in /usr/lib/atlas.
> This fools the system_info.py script into thinking that there aren't
> any useful atlas libs and hence the build does not proceed.  I worked
> around the problem by creating links to these libraries in
> /usr/lib/atlas.

Writing configure tool can be tricky. Different systems, different
distributions of the same system, different users of the same
distribution may install software in endless ways (different
locations, having only or both system-wide and user-defined setups,
etc). Making one user happy probably means making another unhappy etc.

Anyway, I have added some additional hooks so that atlas libraries are
discovered also on Debian Woody.
Prabhu, can you undo your work around and test it with default woody 
setup? Just running system_info.py should be enough to see the effect.

Regardless what I said above I think we should try to get scipy
to build on most widely used distributions. Although I can predict
some problems with linalg2 that implements wrappers to ATLAS routines that
are available only in unstable ATLAS releases, and system 
distributors are sometimes very slow updating even stable releases...

Regards,
	Pearu