Re: Package options dialog

[Sevan Janiyan <venture37%geeklan.co.uk@localhost>]

Hi Jason,

On 07/05/2018 03:41, Jason Bacon wrote:
> Case in point, I happen to be in a conversation right now with the
> developer of plink, a genomics analysis app.  He's reported that it
> performs much better with SSE4.2, and much better still with AVX2,
> features that are not available on many CPUs still in operation, so they
> cannot be part of the default binary package.
> 
> IT skills are scarce in biology research.  Computational research is
> still rather new in this domain, but growing incredibly fast.
> 
> Inability to properly deploy software is a huge problem that can be
> addressed with tools that already exist.
> 
> So picture a biologist with limited computer skills, thousands of
> core-hours of computation between h{im,er} and a grant deadline, and no
> Unix-savvy IT staff to help deploy an open source app like plink.  Using
> the portable binary package could add weeks to the analysis time.  They
> have no idea was SSE or AVX are.
> 
> A relatively small number of packagers can have a huge impact, because
> many researchers are struggling to deploy the same few applications.
> 
> There are many possible solutions, but the one that's in easy reach
> pkgsrc right now is making it easy for them to boostrap a pkgsrc tree
> and built optimizes binaries from source, using -march=native or
> something similar.
> 
> If I can tell someone like this to build the package from source and
> select native optimizations from the config menu, this is something can
> easily handle, and their research will get done much sooner.
> 
> Just one of many examples, some of which could be package options and
> others global settings.

Is it possible to automate this process in your scenario so a user would
not be exposed to the plethora of options by default?
We have the devel/cpuflags package which tries to address the optimum
CPU flags on a build system.

Sevan