From jason at acm.org  Tue Jul 10 19:58:45 2007
From: jason at acm.org (Jason Riedy)
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:58:45 -0700
Subject: [Rd] BLAS / LAPACK version information from within R-session?
References: <46923101.4020608@uni-bayreuth.de>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0707091405370.19965@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <87myy45eei.fsf@nan.sparse.dyndns.org>

And Brian Ripley writes:
> I know of no way to ask a BLAS dynamic library what version it
> is.

Tinkering with the BLAS interface hasn't fared so well, but
LAPACK 3.1 added an ILAVER subroutine that returns the major,
minor, and patch level versions for LAPACK itself.

>> An obvious application could be safety-checks for packages
>> like Matrix and quantreg at load / attach - time.
>
> Why should that be needed?

To warn of bugs in specific LAPACK versions, perhaps.  I know I
let a couple of embarassing typos merge into 3.1.0 with the
eigenvalue drivers.  The ones I know of so far only affect
performance, but there may be another that leads to an unreported
error.  Looks like R makes DSYEVR available through eigen.R, so
it's affected.  Sorry.

And I know prior LAPACK versions have some painful error cases.
They seem to impact few people, so having the LAPACK version in
related bug reports may help remove those causes.

>> Perhaps this information may even be included into the output
>> of R.Version() :-) ?
>
> I can think of more worthy candidates, e.g. the compilers used
> to build R, and for Linux something more precise about the
> distro used.

Alas, yes, those could be very useful with the resurgence of
funny arithmetics.

Jason



[Rd] BLAS / LAPACK version information from within R-session?
Jason Riedy