Bug#760936: BLAS: not Multi-Arch safe

[Sébastien Villemot]

Le mardi 09 septembre 2014 à 12:37 +0000, Thorsten Glaser a écrit :
> Sbastien Villemot dixit:
> 
> >Le mardi 09 septembre 2014 à 11:11 +0200, Thorsten Glaser a écrit :
> >
> >> Helmut and I think you need to move the libblas.so.3
> >> symlink into arch-qualified subdirectories and manage
> >> multiple alternatives, one per architecture.
> >
> >I think this is the way to go. It will have to wait for the release of
> >Jessie though, because we are too late in the current cycle to make that
> >change.
> 
> This is a very bold statement, considering we are dealing
> with realistic application breakage (as M-A is projected
> as “the solution” by more and more people) here.

Essentially this is a wishlist bug, because BLAS implementations have
never been multi-arch safe (and the packages are not marked as
M-A:same). The particular situation that you are describing is due to
someone using one BLAS implementation on one arch and another
implementation on the other arch, which is essentially an attempt to
circumvent the fact that BLAS packages are not M-A:same.

So far nobody has complained about the non availability of multi-arch
for BLAS. You are now rightfully raising this issue, and it will be
dealt with, but it does not make it automatically urgent.

Given that transitions are now frozen for Jessie, and given that the
freeze is less than 2 months ahead, I think that this is too big a
change to be implemented now, for several reasons: it involves multiple
packages (blas, lapack, atlas, openblas); it needs coordinated changes
in those packages, which means that they must all transition to testing
at the same time; the change is tricky because it involves lots of code
in maintainer scripts, with possible problems on upgrade paths; I will
have almost no time in October for Debian.

If you come up soon with working patches for these 4 packages, I will do
my best to review and upload them. Otherwise I don't think that this
move is realistic before the freeze.

-- 
 .''`.    Sébastien Villemot
: :' :    Debian Developer
`. `'     http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
  `-      GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594

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