Decision to remove lapack from FC

[Quentin Spencer]

D Sievers wrote:

> 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.

I don't know anything about this particular decision, but it is somewhat 
related to a discussion I started here a few weeks ago regarding add-ons 
for and additional libraries for octave. The problem with FC's octave is 
that there are some optional fast libraries such as ATLAS and FFTW3 that 
are not included in FC. Some FC users on the octave mailing lists 
actually recommended against using FC version and building your own. I 
had suggested that we consider moving octave out of core so it can be 
linked to some of these other libraries. I think it is necessary to add 
the new libraries to core or move it all to extras to make octave most 
useful. It appears octave is also missing from core, so this may in fact 
be what has happened.

-Quentin