Please package boost-mpi and boost-mpi-dev

[Casey Greene]

boost-mpi and boost-mpi-dev used to be included. They are no longer included. Bug 531973 was resolved by removing them from boost-defaults, but even if they are not in boost-defaults it would be helpful to have them available in ubuntu.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

For good or ill MPI is the defacto standard solution for handling parallel computations in C, C++ and Fortran. For good or ill Boost is the de facto standard library of extensions to C++. Doing any parallleism using C++ will therefore involve Boost.MPI -- including after the C++0x standard comes out and everyone can use futures and asynchronous function call. Ubuntu has ejected the libboost-mpi-dev package and all related Boost.MPI packages. There is therfore now no way of installing Boost.MPI on Ubuntu via packages. Scott Kitterman wrote in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/boost-defaults/+bug/531973, point 15 that there is an objective rationale to this. Debian however are not following this rationale, they retain the Boost.MPI packages, so either have found a way of solving the issue Scott outlines or have chosen not to be bound by that issue.

Unless Ubuntu provides some way of installing Boost.MPI from packages then everyone who uses C++ and Boost.MPI will have to cease using Ubuntu and switch to Debian, or one of the RPM-based distributions.

[Fabrice Coutadeur (fabricesp)]

For the sake of consistency, the explanation why Boost.MPI packages are not built (taken from #531973):

"
Because of the way Boost packages are built, there is not a good way to build the MPI packages in Ubuntu without pulling all of the MPI stack into Main and no one is willing to do that. The default boost version has, AFAIK, never supported MPI for this reason.

If someone can come up with a way to build the MPI and related boost binaries with the MPI build-dependencies in Universe, I'm willing to consider it (this would require a separate build as the default boost that's in main can't use them).
"

[Russel Winder (russel)]

So the Ubuntu packaging policy is now diverging from Debian's: Debian packages libboost-mpi-dev with version 1.42.0 of Boost MPI.

"No one" in the above must mean "no one in the Ubuntu management team" since clearly the Debian team have no problem with this issue.

[Nuno Sucena Almeida (slug-debian)]

This issue has forced me to manually install boost into /opt, both with 9 and 10 versions of the distributions. If the debian people can solve the problem, why not use their knowledge to solve ours?

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

The Ubuntu archive is organized differently than the Debian one which causes some divergence.

Due to the demand for the Boost MPI packages, we have decided to keep two versions of Boost in the archive for Maverick. Boost 1.42 is in Main and (because the needed MPI build-depends aren't in Main) is built without MPI. Boost 1.40 is in Universe and is (as of a few minutes ago) built with all the MPI packages shipped by Debian.

No doubt using an older version of Boost to get MPI is not ideal, but it's the best we can do for now and, I think, far better than nothing.