@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-08-12 18:12:44
I was trying to package #FlexiBLAS for #Gentoo, and to be honest, it doesn't look that good.
The first red flag is lack of an open bug tracker. Apparently, there is the tracker on GitLab that's limited to "members of their group and selected external contributors", but it doesn't seem to be used much. So it's "send us an email", and wonder how many people sent us the same bug report before.
The git repository is currently at something tagged 3.4.80 that seems to be prerelease, and its build system is quite broken. Not exactly the best path to verify that the bugs you are hitting are still there.
Now, upstream seems to insist on either using vendored netlib #LAPACK, or statically linking to the system library (we don't install the static libraries). Apparently I can specify the shared libraries instead, but it doesn't work — and it's unclear to me whether it doesn't work because I'm using the shared libraries, or because it doesn't support my LAPACK version. If I build LAPACK without deprecated symbols, it refuses to load it at runtime because of missing symbols. And if I build it with deprecated symbols, it fails to find some symbols at CMake time.
Honestly, I feel like I've spent too much time on this project already, especially given that its future is entirely unclear to me — the current git is quite broken, I have no clue how many issues were reported already and whether my bug reports will receive any reply. It definitely doesn't fare well for a package that we might start to rely heavily on. We don't want a cathedral there.
https://www.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/projects/flexiblas
https://gitlab.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/software/flexiblas-release
