Re: building package with different libs

On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 23:12 -0600, Steve M. Robbins wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 07:48:19PM -0400, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> > [Copying -beowulf as there's likely some interest there as well.]
> > 
> > On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 15:21 +0100, Manuel Prinz wrote:
> 
> > > When building against OpenMPI, there are a few choices:
> > > 
> > >  1. Do not build packages using OpenMPI on the unsupported arches.
> > >  2. Build against OpenMPI on the supported ones, fall back to LAM on the
> > > unsupported ones.
> 
>     [ ... ]
> 
> > As for -lam where there's no openmpi, I only know of petsc and babel.
> 
> I have subsequently adopted this approach for minc, which uses MPI via
> hdf5.  I will likely adopt it for boost, too, unless someone has a
> better idea.

And ARPACK as well...

> While reading this thread, however, I had an idle thought.  Could we
> prepare an "mpi-default-dev" or "sensible-mpi-dev" package for us to
> build-depend on?  This would be something like the gcc-defaults
> package and simply depend on the appropriate -dev pacakges (OpenMPI on
> some architectures, LAM on the rest).
> 
> The idea is to put the messy details about which architectures support
> OpenMPI and which use LAM in one place.

That's a terrific idea.  Build-Depends are not a big problem in terms of
LAM vs. OpenMPI, because one can use architecture-dependent lists.  But
for dependencies of the -dev package (libpetsc-dev etc.), things are
more tricky; you either need to make a substvar, or use things like
type-handling's not+mipsel etc.

Having an mpi-default-dev would make things a lot easier and clearer in
both cases.  Thanks!

I can go ahead and take care of this later this week unless someone
doesn't think it's a good idea.

-Adam
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