I was going to test the julia programming language and install it using pacman -S julia. However, one of the dependecies causes a conflict this is the blas package which is required by several applications this was found using pacman -Sii blas.
Required By : cblas gmt gnuradio lapack magma r root root-cuda superlu
The instalation of julia suggests the following:
:: openblas and blas are in conflict. Remove blas? [y/N]
My issue is that blas package seems very fundamental to the system, is it safe to openblas instead of blas? How can I figure it out?
You might get a clearer explanation if you ask on the Julia discourse here, but from what I know, the Julia package in the arch repository is built from source independently from what the official Julia provides from it’s releases on their website. I believe the official release would include the required dependencies.
In fact, the recommended way to install Julia is to get the tarball for your respective platform from the website, rather than install from the respective managers for your distribution (like pacman and apt). There are also tools like jill.py then help automate this process.
From personal experience, I have had no problems installing Julia from official release and pacman. But I’ve seen a number of users report problems with dependencies and/or using Julia packages.
What @dalto says. The PKGBUILD for openblas pops in two symlinks at the end of the installation process. These have the same names at the shared objects created by blas, but they point to openblas’s shared objects instead.
That’s great! There are actually a few places where the Julia community is active other than their discourse, such as their Slack and Zulip communities. It’s a great place to ask questions if you need help.