Bug#686926: [Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#686926: liboctave-dev: creates broken .oct files when the OpenMPI flavor of HDF5 (libhdf5-openmpi-dev) is installed

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

On Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 09:17:48AM -0400, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 4 April 2013 19:54, Bradley M. Froehle <brad.froehle at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If only there was a way for the different variants of HDF5 to be simultaneously installable…
> 
> I think this is the real problem,and it goes way up to HDF5 upstream.
> They basically ship two completely different libraries with the same
> soname and the same symbols. *That* is the real bug.

This is well stated since the very initial opening of this bug, and also
well-known upstream. HDF5 staff still saw this problem as secondary at the time 
(i.e. they have not a dedicated budget for solving this issue). 

This is because HDF5 is still seen as an ad-hoc tool for specific applications, 
not as a general commodity library.
If you had to build everything from scratch for your own purposes, those aspects 
are non-issues, of course. Unfortunately, that is not the case of a binary
distribution, as in Debian case.

The only practical thing to do is patching for splitting MPI and serial
library names and proposing those patches to upstream. Of course, it would
break compatibility for tons of other packages and third-parties products,
but I see no other possibilities.

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine