[Pkg-octave-devel] liboctave-dev insists on serial version of the hdf5 library

[lukshuntim at gmail.com]

On Thursday, August 09, 2012 05:15 PM, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> lukshuntim at gmail.com writes:
> 
>> I want to install liboctave-dev to use the pkg function and it insists
>> on the dependency libhdf5-dev which in turn depends on the *serial*
>> version libhdf5-7.
>>
>> I already have both libhdf5-openmpi-7 and libhdf5-openmpi-dev installed
>> which, according to apt-cache showpkg, provide libhdf5-7 and libhdf5-dev
>> respectively. The trouble is if I install the serial version of hdf5,
>> there's a conflict leading to their removal and also the *consequential*
>> removal of other packages that need the parallel version of hdf5 --
>> something I can't afford. :-(
>>
>> I understand hdf5 is difficult to deal with but what would be the best
>> way forward?
> 
> Note that octave works with libhdf5-openmpi-7, but liboctave-dev indeed
> needs libhdf5-dev which is not co-installable with libhdf5-openmpi-7.

Sebastien,

Thanks for the reply, and also for the work done. That's already a great
improvement.

> 
> Using the MPI version of HDF5 with liboctave-dev was not working (see
> #598227). Then the HDF5 maintainers encouraged us to enforce the serial
> version. And unfortunately the two development packages are not
> co-installable.
> 
> For more background information, see:
> 
>  http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/2012-February/008354.html

Yes, it's really unfortunate, but it seems the (hdf) situation won't be
changed. I don't know what percentage of users need hdf5 support in
octave though personally I don't. So just a wild idea. :-) Would it be a
lot of work for the maintainers to provide an "octave-nohdf" variant so
that (liboctave-nohdf-dev is installable and) mkoctave and pkg are
available to guys who need mpi computational capabilities in debian?

Regards,
ST
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