[Pkg-octave-devel] The future of Atlas

[Sébastien Villemot]

Hi,

As you may have seen, the state of the atlas package is not good. It has
not transitioned from unstable to testing for a long time, because of
several RC bugs difficult to handle.

I have been discussing this issue with Sylvestre Ledru, the maintainer
of atlas. Even though he has not made a decision yet, he is now
considering the possibility of removing atlas from the archive. I am
going to help him maintain the package but I am not sure that we can
solve the various issues. Especially there are FTBFS on several release
architectures and upstream seems not willing to help.

The good news is that we have an alternative to atlas, namely openblas,
which is packaged in unstable and should hopefully transition soon to
testing. I have tested it with Dynare and it seems fast and stable.

Also note that when the new (netlib) blas/lapack packages transition to
testing, atlas will be broken in testing (unless we manage to have a new
version of atlas into testing, which is far from guaranteed as explained
above). The cause of this breakage is the renaming from libblas.so.3gf
to libblas.so.3.

All in all, it is becoming likely that we will have to change the
Recommends field of octave from atlas to openblas. This may even have to
be done for Wheezy.

-- 
Sébastien Villemot
Researcher in Economics & Debian Maintainer
http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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