On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 at 23:09:08 +0200, Sylvestre Ledru wrote: > Quick remember, Atlas is a linear algebra library implementing the BLAS > API/ABI. It is widely used in the scientific computing world but also by > some spreadsheets (openoffice). > This is an highly optimized library. The optimisation is done at build > time against the hardware it is building on.
It seems to me that there are two major use cases: For use on smallish data sets (most OpenOffice users, and I suspect many scientific users too), all that matters is that it's correct and not ridiculously slow; conservative assumptions (libatlas3gf-base), or indeed the unoptimized BLAS, would probably be fine. Prompting OpenOffice users with a debconf prompt that, as far as they're concerned, says "[things you don't understand] will be slow unless you [things you don't understand]" seems very undesirable. I don't want to have to care about scientific computing stuff on large data sets, because I don't *have* large data sets; I just want a spreadsheet :-) (Is there anything that specifically needs Atlas and couldn't use BLAS?) The other use case is serious HPC where it's worth rebuilding your packages for the particular host/cluster, in which case an easy-ish way to build a libatlas3gf-local package (/usr/share/doc/libatlas*/examples?) seems sufficient? Simon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100818111311.gb25...@reptile.pseudorandom.co.uk