[Numpy-discussion] Disallow Accelerate as a LAPACK backend for NumPy

[Matti Picus]

    On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 12:41 AM Matti Picus <matti.picus at gmail.com>
    wrote:

    Apple has dropped support for Accelerate. It has bugs that have not been
    fixed, and is closed source so we cannot fix them ourselves. We have
    been getting a handful of reports from users who end up building NumPy
    on macOS, and inadvertently link to Accelerate, then end up with wrong
    linalg results. In PR 14880https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14880  I
    propose to disallow finding it when building NumPy. At this time it will
    remain in distutils as one of the backends to support users, but how do
    people feel about a future PR to totally remove it?

Someone pointed out that Apple has not officially dropped support as far as it can be determined. Sorry for the bad information. However, I still stand by the "has bugs that have not been fixed, and is closed source". An alternative to dropping automatic support for it would be to find a channel for engaging with Apple to report and fix the bugs.

Matti