viennacl package

[Toby St Clere Smithe]

Hi,

(Please CC me, as I'm not subscribed to debian-science-maintainers.)

I've noticed that the viennacl package seems a bit neglected. Over the
summer, I took part in a Google Summer of Code project to write Python
bindings for ViennaCL, which has produced a downstream project,
PyViennaCL[1], which I hope to develop in parallel with the main
ViennaCL project.

I have produced Debian packages for PyViennaCL, which I aim to submit to
Debian[2] as soon as ViennaCL 1.5.0 is released (at which point I will
release PyViennaCL 1.0.0); if anyone uses Ubuntu, they can test my
packages using the PPA[3].

At the moment, since PyViennaCL builds cleanly against upstream ViennaCL
git master, it seems wrong to have the PyViennaCL Debian package build
against a local duplicate of the ViennaCL sources, instead of the
libviennacl-dev package -- but PyViennaCL needs a current set of
headers, not version 1.2.0.

Since the viennacl package has not had any updates in almost 17 months
(whilst ViennaCL upstream is now at version 1.4.2), and since I'm
involved both in upstream development and a small amount of Debian
maintainership, I'd be happy to adopt the viennacl package or help
maintain it, alongside the pyviennacl package, if that would suit
people.

Finally, would anyone be willing to sponsor my pyviennacl package?


[1] https://github.com/tsmithe/viennacl-dev/tree/pyviennacl
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=732921
[3] https://launchpad.net/~tsmithe/+archive/pyviennacl


Best,

Toby Smithe