Opinions on packaging ATLAS (for the x86 architecture)

[Kevin Kofler]

Deji Akingunola wrote:
> i). Create a generic x86 'atlas' main package for the P6 architecture,
> which is a non-SSE and minimum CPU that Fedora can support ATM.
> atlas-sse, atlas-sse2, and atlas-sse3 would then be sub-packages that
> users will have to specifically install to benefit from the atlas
> optimizations.

IMHO, that's the simplest solution and the only one really compliant with 
our packaging guidelines (support all architecture variants by default, 
provide optimized versions as optionals).

Of course the root of the problem is ATLAS's lack of support for runtime CPU 
feature detection (which is the recommended solution for Fedora packaging), 
but I don't expect that to get fixed any time soon. (The ATLAS developers 
expect everybody to compile a tuned ATLAS for their own machine and show 
only very limited interest in binary packaging.)

        Kevin Kofler