Hello guys, > I agree, debconf configuration is a good compromise.
Thank you everyone for your attention. I agree to use debconf too and it looks like the best solution to the disagreements in previous discussions. The mechanism was implemented in the packaging lately. The user will be asked whether he/she wants to use libmkl_rt.so as an alternative to libblas.so.3 and liblapack.so.3 [1][2], and the db_input importance is set to critical. Default option is false. By default, or if user rejects this proposal, the lowest priority will be assgined to libmkl-rt [3]. Another reason why default is set to false is because we have to also consider about the users who don't know what they are doing, and the users who don't know what MKL is at all. In the original post I proposed to also set it as alternative to libblas.so/liblapack.so . However this is problematic since MKL is a superset which not only includes BLAS/LAPACK symbols but also many other MKL-specific symbols. To avoid accidents or problematic usage such as an ELF being linked at symbols which exist in MKL, (e.g. #include <mkl.h>, gcc ... -lblas -llapack) but not the other BLAS implementations, I changed my mind and decided to do nothing with libblas.so / liblapack.so . At the time of writing, the MKL package is lintian clean. Success of local install test of both amd64 and i386 demostrates the correctness of the dependency graph. Briefly speaking I think its ready. Here is the packaging repo [4]. [5] is a list of package contents on i386 architecture. [6] is a list of package contents on amd64 architecture. The last and only blocker for me to file an RFS is a trivial license issue, for which I'm waiting upstream's reply [7]. P.S. I've created a Simplified Chinese translation file[8] for debconf. If you'd like to contribute translations for other languages, please feel free to push the changes without asking me. Other changes are welcome but please mail me first before push. [1] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl/blob/master/debian/libmkl-rt.templates [2] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl/blob/master/debian/libmkl-rt.config [3] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl/blob/master/debian/libmkl-rt.postinst.in [4] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl [5] https://salsa.debian.org/lumin-guest/tempfiles/blob/master/mkl-debc-i386.txt [6] https://salsa.debian.org/lumin-guest/tempfiles/blob/master/mkl-debc-amd64.txt [7] https://github.com/intel/mkl-dnn/issues/206#issuecomment-385154890 [8] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl/blob/master/debian/po/zh_CN.po
