Hi team, This is a message on my future plan to overhaul the intel-mkl package. Some people (bcc'ed) from intel are interested as well, so I'm sharing the plan to a public list.
The current MKL version in our archive has been outdated for 3 years https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/intel-mkl largely because of Intel's OneAPI transition, significantly changed the components and the upstream package layout. These are the next steps to overhaul the package to make it more maintainable: 1. Greatly simplify the binary package layout. We split the upstream package into very fine-grained packages. But it is not really that necessary. For the next update, we should trim the binary packages into only two: bin:libmkl-rt bin:libmkl-dev All the other packages will be deleted and replaced by the new ones. 2. Different from the intel's upstream .deb packages, we will make the installed files follow the FHS. 3. Different from intel's upstream installation, we will not install all the SYCL and OpenCL related binary files. SYCL is not yet incorporated into Debian. So currently we can only make it CPU-only. 4. Different from the upstream .deb packages, we integrate the libmkl-rt package into our update-alternatives system for libblas.so and liblapack.so . I'll still keep it in shape for the next upload. That should be it. The current packaging of intel-mkl is just overcomplicated. The python script for generating the installation control files should be replaced by Makefile/bash as well.