[Rd] BLAS and ATLAS

[Göran Broström]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 11:48:23AM +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Aug 2005, Göran Broström wrote:

> >LAPACK/BLAS routines call xerbla "if an input parameter has an
> >invalid value" (exact quote from  XERBLA at Netlib). Other types of errors
> >are not printed (by xerbla), but it is up to the user to check the return
> >value of the argument 'INFO'. See
> >http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lug/node119.html.
> 
> Maybe, that is not actually true for real-life LAPACK implementations, as 
> I did say.
> 
> >So we can safely give the more informative, original, error messages,
> >together with mentioning LAPACK and eventually BLAS, whatever you prefer.
> >This would "make clear what these refer to". Given that other BLAS/LAPACK
> >routines than xerbla aren't changed in R, of course.
> 
> Irrelevant as R is often compiled against other ones implementations.

That confuses me. My R installation (R-devel of yesterday) is compiled
against ATLAS BLAS (from Debian-unstable). Why, then, is xerbla from  R  
sources used anyway? 

Göran