Decision to remove lapack from FC

[D Sievers]

Hello, if there is a better place to ask this question, please advise.

I was wondering why lapack was removed from FC development. I work in
the field of scientific computing, and FC is my favorite distro. I would
like to advertise Fedora to our admins, so hopefully we could use it on
our clusters. However, it will become more difficult to encourage people
to switch to Fedora if this staple scientific library isn't included by
default.

True, using yum to add it isn't difficult, but it in my opinion it would
be better to keep it in core. Another reason to do so it that
python-numeric was recently added. The numeric module only contains a
"watered down" lapack version, but is capable of being linked to the
lapack libraries for increased performance. I was considering working on
a "python-numeric-lapack" package that extends "python-numeric" to use
the lapack libraries instead, or even suggest that it uses it by default
and requires lapack, because something such as "python-numeric-lapack"
might need to overwrite files in the regular "python-numeric" module,
which means it can't be in Core or Extras.

I would think that RHEL would also take a hit on this, unless lapack is
still in RHEL, even though I figure that because RHEL will be based on
Fedora maybe the same decision was made there. Paying RHEL customers
working in the scientific community would probably share my
disappointment. Nevertheless, it's your project and you call the shots,
but I would rather support Fedora on our clusters than have our admins
start looking into Suse.

If anyone could shed a little more light on this, please let me know.

Thanks!

Doug Sievers