Dear Gentoo Devs, I have prepared an ebuild for a library named IT++, since it is not in portage yet. The IT++ library is a C++ library of mathematical, signal processing, speech processing, and communications classes and functions. It is being developed by researchers in these areas and is widely used by researchers, both in the communications industry and universities. The kernel of the IT++ library are templated vector and matrix classes, and lots of functions for vectors and matrices. Such a kernel makes IT++ library similar to Matlab or Octave. The attached ebuild depends on a few sci-libs libraries (fftw, blas-atlas and lapack), but can be compiled without them as well. BTW, I am one of the developers and a Gentoo fan as well, so I will try to maintain the ebuild in future. Best regards, /ediap
Created attachment 77984 [details] An ebuild for the IT++ 3.9.0 library
Adam, Thanks for a submission! I just glanced at ebuild and it seems reasonable, just two questions: 1. does it strictly require blas-atlas? Can it not work with blas-reference as well? If yes it would be better to make it depend on virtual/blas instead. 2. if [ -z `which g77` ]; then should probably be replaced with whatever plays well with fortran.eclass. Unfortunately I did not follow its development closely lately, so I'll leave the details to you and people involved with eclass, however my understanding is that you need to use eclass provided tests instead. Unfortunately I cannot looks at this closer now, but you should have received CC of my forwarding of your email already, so I won't reiterate.. George
George, Thank you for having a look at this ebuild. Answering to your questions comments: 1) The dependency on blas-atlas is due to the fact that it is recommended that IT++ uses CBLAS, which is provided by atlas in Gentoo. Unfortunately CBLAS not provided by virtual/blas. It is possible to compile the library without CBLAS, but some internal functions will have reduced performance. The best solution would be to add CBLAS interface to blas-reference package. Or create a separate package, which will provide virtual/cblas and depend on blas-reference. 2) I will look into this fortran.eclass and try to adapt the fortran compiler checks using this... BTW, a bug-fix release (version 3.9.1) should appear soon (we hope in January), so I will try to fix issue 2) by the way of bumping the ebuild. Best regards, /ediap
Created attachment 78358 [details, diff] small changes to itpp-3.9.0.ebuild Hi Adam, I had a look at your ebuild and it looks fine besides a few small changes: - I currently don't see why we need g77 to compile itpp; looking at the compile log I only see c++ code. Could you comment on this? - With USE="doc" we need doxygen which I've added to DEPEND. Please have a look at the changes, give it a a try and let me know what you think. Thanks, Markus
Dear Markus, Thanks for your comments and a patch. Concerning your questions: - g77 or gfortran compiler is needed because it is recommended that IT++ usees blas and lapack libraries. In order to link to these libraries one need to use some special flags for linker. These flags are set in the FLIBS variable by the autoconf's macro AC_F77_LIBRARY_LDFLAGS. And this macro requires a fortran compiler; I guess, the same one, which blas and lapack libraries have been compiled with. Therefore, I readded the check for a fortran compiler. This time, I used fortran.eclass's function `need_fortran()'. - beside Doxygen, TeTeX and Ghostscript are also required to build the documentation, so I added these packages to the DEPEND as well. Please find the attached patch with my changes. BTW, have you read my comment #3 concerning CBLAS? Is is possible to include CBLAS interface to blas-reference library and provide an extra virtual for CBLAS? /ediap
Created attachment 78373 [details, diff] further changes to itpp-3.9.0.ebuild
Hi Adam, Thanks for the patch and it looks good with two minor corrections: - no need to explictly call "need_fortran" since this is the default action of pkg_setup() when inheriting the fortran.eclass - we don't need virtual/ghostscript in DEPEND since this gets pulled in by doxygen. I'll test it once more tomorrow and then move it into the tree unless you have any objections. I will have a look at the cblas/blas-reference stuff. For now we can just go with depending on blas-atlas. Thanks, Markus
Thanks Markus! Because we released the IT++ 3.9.1 yesterday evening, I updated the ebuild, taking your comments into account. I have added one more switch to econf depending on blas flag, to assure that it is possible to totally switch off linking IT++ to blas/cblas. BR, /ediap
Created attachment 78417 [details] itpp-3.9.1.ebuild - version bumped
Hi Adam, Thanks for the ebuild and all your help! I just committed the itpp-3.9.1.ebuild to CVS and I'll maintain the package. It would be great if you could keep us posted on any changes/updates. Thanks, Markus
Thanks again! I will of course inform you about further changes in the IT++ package. BTW, I look forward for any improvements in Gentoo concerning the CBLAS. /ediap
