Re: forcing local build from a package definition

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Eric Bavier <ericbavier@gmail.com> wrote:
> ATLAS provides only a handful of the LAPACK routines.  The primary
> focus is on BLAS routines.  In order for ATLAS to provide a full lapack
> experience, it needs to be configured with the netlib lapack (which is
> where our current lapack package comes from).

yes, I know. But you can tell it to build a full lapack library
(making use of the lapack source tar).  But this is not the point.

> ATLAS frequently pulls its tuning configuration information from a table
> of known values at configuration time.  I think there is also a way to
> tell it which architecture it should be built for.

Not really.  You can specify the architecture at configure time.  But,
then it does not exploits the full instruction set and features of
your CPU and results in a suboptimal library.  For optimal performance
it needs to run timing tests during build time.  Note that since some
time Debian also provides a was to build ATLAS on your own machine.

http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/atlas_install/atlas_install.html

There may be other faster libraries, but ATLAS is used by many
applications, including numpy/scipy which is actually the reason for
which I'm working on ATLAS.

Regards,
Fede