[Pkg-opencl-devel] status of opencl clhpp / cl2hpp in Debian

[Ghislain Vaillant]

Dear Debian OpenCL Maintainers,

I would like to discuss the current status of the OpenCL C++ headers
currently available in testing / unstable. I am myself a packager of
several OpenCL dependent libraries (clBLAS, clFFT, ArrayFire), so
effective packaging of the C++ headers is an important issue to me.

Currently, the OpencCL C++ headers are distributed alongside the C
headers in the opencl-headers package. The package was eventually
updated from 1.2 to 2.0, which no longer shipped cl.hpp in favor of the
new cl2.hpp. This had the unfortunate consequence to break OpenCL C++
detection for some of the projects listed above. Because of this lack
of reliability, they now use an embedded copy of cl2.hpp fetched via
CMake. I still convinced them to leave an option to use a system one.

Another reason for using the embedded copy is that our headers are
apparently not so recent anymore. Several bugs have been filed regarding
this matter [1, 2], but they have yet to receive any attention.

Finally, it looks like upstream has moved development activity to
GitHub and split the OpenCL C and C++ headers to different
repositories, which is detailed in another bug report [3].

Moving forward, I am wondering what is the best course of action and I
am willing to help to make it happen. My gut feeling tells me that we
would need a new source package (khronos-opencl-clhpp) and one (opencl
clhpp-headers) or perhaps two (opencl-clhpp-header, opencl-cl2hpp
header) binary packages built from it, and a well planned transition.

Thoughts?

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=829747
[2] 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/khronos-opencl-headers/+bug/1619706
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=829748

Best regards,
Ghis