Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] blas, cblas, lapack, suitesparse [was Re: suitesparse support - help request]

[Alois Schlögl]

On 07/15/2010 09:43 AM, Volker Grabsch wrote:
> Alois Schlögl<address@hidden>  schrieb:
>    
>
> > I'm asking to include lapack.mk into mingw-cross-env, it provides
> > libblas.a and liblapack.a.
> >      
> It looks okay to me. However, I'm a bit behind with including
> contributions, so please be patient with me. :-)
>
> However, I notices that your blas and cblas scripts have an
> important flaw:
>
>    
> > $(PKG)_SUBDIR   := BLAS
> > $(PKG)_FILE     := blas.tgz
> > $(PKG)_WEBSITE  := http://www.netlib.org/
> > $(PKG)_URL      := http://www.netlib.org/blas/blas.tgz
> >      
>    
> > $(PKG)_SUBDIR   := CBLAS
> > $(PKG)_FILE     := cblas.tgz
> > $(PKG)_WEBSITE  := http://www.netlib.org/
> > $(PKG)_URL      := http://www.netlib.org/blas/blast-forum/cblas.tgz
> >      
> Both do not download the source package of the given version.
> Instead, they seem to download always the latest one. This is
> almost never a good idea:
>
> It can silently introduce build issues, and makes them
> especially hard to reproduce and thus to debug. Also note that
> Mingw-cross-env's checksum test will make your test script
> unusable as soon as upstream releases a new version.
>
>    

> Greets,
> Volker
>
>    


Hi Volker,


Netlib does not provide version numbers for cblas and blas. A possible 
explanation can be found in the FAQ,  
http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html#1 which says that the package is
the "Fortran 77 reference implementation of the BLAS". I guess this 
means that there are no more changes expected, and therefore no version 
numbers are provided. The latest changes in cblas are from 2003, so 
CBlas is really, really stable and a new release (casing a break of this 
script) is very unlikely. Therefore I suggest to include cblas.mk, 
despite the missing versioning.

Since blas is also build with lapack (which has a version numbering), 
blas.mk could be omitted.


Alois