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#1 2014-09-17 09:07:29

rubenvb
Member
Registered: 2011-01-14
Posts: 99

Out-of-date package not been updated in almost a year

The question I have is: what should I do when I see a package that has not been updated in almost a year (after its flag-out-of-date)? I can't seem to find any info on how such a situation is handled. I can't reflag and sending an email to the maintainer seems intrusive and/or rude. There may be an underlying reason to not upgrade, or the flag was lost in time and forgotten.

The package I have in mind is opencl-headers. It got stuck on v1.1, and never updated to v1.2, and now still not to v2.0. There is an AUR package for the 1.2 headers, but that just seems silly to have around.

Thanks for any input!

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#2 2014-09-17 09:27:26

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,868

Re: Out-of-date package not been updated in almost a year

OpenCL PKGBUILD wrote:

_clbasever=1.1 # Keep 1.1 until Nvidia starts supporting 1.2

Maybe Nvidia still doesn't support 1.2 or later ?


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#3 2014-09-17 09:34:13

Allan
Pacman
From: Brisbane, AU
Registered: 2007-06-09
Posts: 11,365
Website

Re: Out-of-date package not been updated in almost a year

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#4 2014-09-17 09:58:04

rubenvb
Member
Registered: 2011-01-14
Posts: 99

Re: Out-of-date package not been updated in almost a year

I see, there is a backstory to all this. It seems though momentum was lost when ocl-icd devs did not respond to the email requesting info. The last commit to their repo was for 2.0 support, back in 2013. It seems abandoned since then, maybe a new spark of activity will come when a new OpenCL spec comes out.

The current situation is quite terrible really: libcl in the repos is from the NVIDIA package, so this means a hard dependency on a vendor not willing to follow the latest version of the spec. Way back when it was probably a sane choice, but now, as the email linnked by Allan shows, the situation is different.
Either choice, be it ocl-icd or Khronos, will improve the situation (OpenCL version and license-wise). Currently ocl-icd has one advantage (detailed in the POCL developer docs): choosing the icd at runtime.

As any CUDA or AMDAPP or Intel OpenCL package will include their libOpenCL, and it can be selected by LD_LIBRARY_PATH if required, I hope a sane libOpenCL package will soon make it into the repo.

As for backward compatibility: I believe the headers are backwards compatible, and it is up to the applications to verify the device they want to use supports the functionality they use. As for forward compatibility: if one solution fails and an alternative is better: just replace the package providing the ICD library by a better one.

Note that both the OpenCL headers and the ICD (libOpenCL) are designed to be platform-agnostic and should in principle work with all versions of the spec and devices, limited only by the device capabilities as reported through OpenCL functions. Currently, libcl and the old opencl-headers version is the limiting factor, which is Terrible®, given the (open source) alternatives.

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#5 2014-09-17 10:37:46

Awebb
Member
Registered: 2010-05-06
Posts: 6,272

Re: Out-of-date package not been updated in almost a year

As a rule of thumb, the bbs is for support threads, anything around packages and the Arch development should be discussed at the mailing list. No matter how well thought out your post will be, you will have to post it on the respective mailing list in the end, because not every developer reads every thread on the bbs,

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