[Slackbuilds-users] A few questions/remarks

[Serban Udrea]

Hello!

I wrote a slackbuild for compiling ATLAS 3.8.3, one of the tuned BLAS 
libraries, and would like to submit it. Nevertheless, I cannot, at the 
time beeing, test it on a 64-bit system. Thus, I think that it would be 
nice if someone could help with testing on such a machine, before I do 
the submission.

ATLAS by itself doesn't bring much, the main thing one has to do is to 
get also LAPACK compiled against it, before all other packages which 
depend on LAPACK+BLAS. Thus I took the original slackbuild written by 
Eugene Suter and modified it such that it can optionally perform the 
LAPACK build against ATLAS. But I have the same problem as with ATLAS 
and I also would like to know how to eventually proceed with the 
submission:  make a separate slackbuild out of it or share/pass 
maintenance with/to Eugene -- if he agrees and it's possible?

A few other remarks:

a) The download link for ipython changed to:
http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/0.10/ipython-0.10.tar.gz

b) ipython has a bunch of optional dependencies, most of them -- only 
exception is foolscap if I'm not mistaken -- also provided on 
SlackBuilds.org or available with Slackware 13.0. I think that it would 
be nice if the README would mention them.

c) Netlib BLAS does to my knowledge not have version 3.2.1, since it 
doesn't follow LAPACK. It is a (relatively old) reference implementation 
and maybe the version should be like with cblas the date of last 
modifications (packaging) 20070321.

d) To my knowledge scipy does not depend, and thus the corresponding 
slackbuild should not require any of matplotlib, iPython and FFTW. 
Moreover, starting with version 0.7.0 the release notes of scipy state 
that all fft modules except (netlib) fftpack have been removed. 
Actually, I lost a lot of time because scipy/INSTALL and 
numpy/site.cfg.example still mention FFTW as an option but the build of 
scipy ignores its presence.

e) While blas and lapack are put into the Libraries category, cblas is 
in Academic. Maybe all of them should be in the same category.

f) It would be nice if the slackbuilds for the following software would 
get upgraded for the last bug-fix releases:

blender to 2.49b
zope.interface to 2.5.3
pexpect to 2.3
fftw to 3.2.2
numpy to 1.4.0
scipy to 0.7.1

Best regards,

Serban Udrea