Hi, Krunoslav,
I am currently responsible for Debian packages.
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Krunoslav Prsa kprsa@phys.ethz.ch wrote:
Are ALPS binary packages available for download/automatic update through standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories?
Yes, but currently only for Debian sid(unstable)/squeeze(testing). See below for the apt line.
http://alps.comp-phys.org/mediawiki/index.php/Download_and_install_ALPS_2#In...
Right now it hosts only 2.0.0rc3 binary for amd64. For other arch, Debian standard way:
$ apt-get build-dep alps2 $ apt-get source --build alps2
can create packages.
This appears to be the main argument of the clusters' system administrators against requests to install alps libraries and applications. They claim that it is not possible and that it involves extra work for them to update it manually (which they are not paid for). I also cannot seem to find it in packages.debian.org and packages.ubuntu.com. There are only some old binaries for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
Old days (Debian etch; ALPS 1.2), ALPS library/applications were part of Debian official. But I could not help package maintainer those days, and at lenny the package dropped.
Due to the licencing issue, ALPS packages are non-free (for Debian). However, now that the Debian package creation becomes very straightforward, it would be possible to ask Debian to contain ALPS packages again once Debian squeeze is out and ALPS 2.0 is released.
The manual installation of ALPS on a cluster without administration privileges is difficult. This needs to be said, although I understand that you are continuously doing steps to make it easier. I think that many end users would appreciate having a standardized way of installing and updating the packages through the repositories.
For clusters, isn't your $HOME NFS (or cluster FS) shared? I believe that every node in the recent cluster have access to shared $HOME. If this is the case, installing ALPS under $HOME is sufficient.
Best regards,