Hardcoded atlas path in configure.ac doesn't support different linux OSes and non-standard atlas installation locations

[asreimer]

Edit: For necpp v1.6.1

On both Fedora 29 and CentOS 7, the configure script is unable to find atlas. It seems that the installation process assumes that atlas will be installed in a specific location, but that location is the same across different versions of linux.

On both, I have the standard atlas and atlas-devel packages installed. These packages install the atlas library into /usr/lib64/atlas, in contrast to the /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas on Ubuntu and Debian.

I think the problem that I encountered is due to hardcoded paths in on lines 56 and 59 in the configure.ac file. The surrounding code uses AC_CHECK_LIB, but reading the autotools documentation, it seems that one should be using AC_SEARCH_LIBS instead to maximize portability.

In any case, I was able to get the configure script to work after changing the hardcoded: /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas and /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas -llapack to /usr/lib64/atlas and /usr/lib64/atlas -lsatlas on lines 73 and 76 of configure.ac. The latter change, /usr/lib64/atlas -lsatlas, which replaces the -llapack flag, is needed because atlas changed library names (see here). The lapack on line 75 also needs to be substituted for satlas and finally, one also needs to replace the -llapack on line 128 with -lsatlas.

Perhaps a simple solution is to provide both a configure.ac.debian and configure.ac.redhat and then as part of the installation instructions tell the use which to use?

At the very least, hopefully reporting this issue helps others install necpp on redhat-based linux distros. Cheers!

[tmolteno]

Many thanks for this. It would be very nice to have a cross-platform way to manage the lapack install. A docker container might be the way to go.

[ewheelerinc]

@asreimer, you might want -ltatlas because its multithreaded, but that depends on what you're doing I suppose.