More on binary packages and FFTW/ATLAS

[Quentin Spencer]

This is a follow up to the discussion on binary packages and the
separate discussion on octave-maintainers about fftw3. I recently
discussed with Paul putting some binary packages in RPM format in the
octave-forge download area. My long term vision (to be implemented as I
have time) is to maintain a group of packages (similar to what Dirk does
for Debian) that are on the Fedora mirrors and can be installed via
apt-get. My hope is that if the binaries are not compatible with other
distributions (SuSE, Mandrake), the source RPMs will be, and can be used
to generate compatible packages. The packages would likely be octave,
FFTW, ATLAS, and octave-forge, since gnuplot and others are already
included with RedHat/Fedora. The question I have is how to approach the
distribution of the FFTW and ATLAS libraries, when they could be used on
a variety of different hardware. If I understand correctly (correct me
if I'm wrong), the fftw_wisdom file contains all of the machine specific
optimizations, while the rest of the binary code is generic, but ATLAS
does some compile-time optimizations. How has this been handled in the
past for the other binary distributions (Debian, Windows, or OSX)?



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------