Honza Macháček wrote:
On 26.02.2007 01:38, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
I'm a little curious about something ... does "rkward" actually require
an external Lapack, or is this optional? The reason I ask is that R
itself *contains* a copy of Lapack, and the R developers have deprecated
linking against external Lapack libraries!
I think I recall some discussion at the bugzilla to the point that all
multimedia packages that compile their own libraries instead of linking
to external ones should be hardmasked, allegedly for the sake of
maintainability. Moreover in my mailbox I've found an old discussion
(28. 8. 2006) of Freemat 2.0 and problems with its dependency on matio,
when accidentally I myself called to attention that Freemat sources
contained their own copy of the matio library, and Andrey G. Grozin
dismissed the option of using them rather fiercely, reasoning:
This goes against modularity, *the* fundamental principle of any good
Linux distribution.
Well, here's the logic of the R developers (from
http://cran.fhcrc.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html):
"A.3.2 LAPACK
Provision is made for using an external LAPACK library, principally to
cope with BLAS libraries which contain a copy of LAPACK (such as
|libsunperf| on Solaris, |vecLib| on Mac OS X and ACML on
`ix86'/`x86_64' Linux). However, the likely performance gains are
thought to be small (and may be negative), and the default is not to
search for a suitable LAPACK library, and this is definitely *not*
recommended.
[snip]
"For problems compiling LAPACK using recent versions of |gcc| on `ix86'
Linux, see New platforms
<http://cran.fhcrc.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#New-platforms>: these
problems have surfaced in Fedora Core 3's distribution, for example.
"Please *do* bear in mind that using --with-lapack is `definitely *not*
recommended': it is provided *only* because it is necessary on some
platforms."
In any event, when I have beta-tested R releases on my Athlon Thunderbird, when I use the
"with-lapack" option and link R with the external Atlas LAPACK I get many failures in the
"make check-all" pass. These don't happen when I just use the Atlas BLAS, so I don't use
the external LAPACK with R.
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits
fire.
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