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

[David M. Cooke]

At some point, Pearu Peterson <pearu at cens.ioc.ee> wrote:

> 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.

Note that atlas in Debian Sid (unstable) can be different. There are
processor-specific atlas packages which install the libraries in
/usr/lib/{3dnow,sse,sse2}. It looks like the code for discovering the
libraries always looks for a library path of the form
prefix+'lib'+something. It seems to me that it should do something
like libprefix+something, allowing libprefix to be specified separately.

I decided to rewrite system_info.py to use a configuration file for
where to look. I've eschewed a sophisticated automated search that can
fail with no simple way to override, for a simple automated search and
user-settable paths. My version reads a site.cfg (which is in the same
directory as system_info.py) which is in a .INI format (read with
ConfigParser).

I can now compile scipy with no troubles :-) Hope you can use this.

-- 
|>|\/|<
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
|David M. Cooke
|cookedm at physics.mcmaster.ca
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