Bug#777598: [hdf5] MPI Versions Enhance libhdf5-serial

[Axel Huebl]

Package: libhdf5-serial-dev
Version: all
Severity: wishlist
Tags: newcomer

Dear Debian HDF5 Maintainers,


I realized a long-standing problem with the different package versions
of hdf5 where I would like to propose a redesign of the dependencies for.

Basically, hdf5 compiled with --enable-parallel enables an *additional*
API for parallel reads&writes but at the same time *still provides* the
standard, serial API.

Still, most of the packages in Debian that depend on hdf5 are compiled
against
  libhdf5-serial(-dev)

even if they would work perfectly fine when linked against the parallel
version (they would still only use the serial API).

That causes a user/developer that wants to use mpi parallel versions to
force-de-install packages and tools such as
  - hdf5view
  - hdf5-tools
  - h5py (btw: they also have a parallel API)
  - ...

Since the parallel API plainly expands the serial version and both
library versions should even be fully ABI compatible, I therefore suggest:

Let us list the packages
  - libhdf5-mpi/mpich/openmpi

as "Enhances" the serial versions of the packages.

Do you have any comments on that?


Thank you and all the best,
Axel Huebl



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.0
  APT prefers testing-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-updates'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages libhdf5-serial-dev depends on:
pn  libhdf5-dev  <none>

libhdf5-serial-dev recommends no packages.

libhdf5-serial-dev suggests no packages.

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