MPFR mess (Was: Re: [genius-list] Mac OS X genius install)

On Sat, Apr 10, 2004 at 10:23:34AM +1000, Tim Allen wrote:
> OK, I'm confused about all this MPFR buisness. The instructions I found
> on the Genius website say you have to replace a chunk of the GMP
> library with the MPFR library, but is this really necessary?
>
> The GMP homepage (http://www.swox.com/gmp/) says, under "Projects using
> GMP":
>
> * MPFR, an add-on library for floating-point arithmetic. (A version of
> this library was included with GMP 4.1.2.)

You don't have to "replace" chunk of gdm with mpfr, but it's semi confusing.
MPFR is bundled with GMP, but is not enabled by default, OR you can get MPFR
separately and build it separately. AFAIK the long term goal is to use MPFR
for floating point inside GMP instead of MPF, but that doesn't concern
genius. All it needs is to have MPFR installed, be it separately or as a
part of GMP. BUT gmp must be configured with --enable-mpfr.

> The Fink package database entry for GMP
> (http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/gmp) says that there's a
> GMP 4.1.2 package available for every recent version of OS X.
>
> So doesn't that mean that if you just install GMP from Fink normally,
> you'll get MPFR also?

Depends how they build their package. If they build with --enable-mpfr,
then you get mpfr in the gmp package, otherwise you have to either
  1) rebuild gmp with --enable-mpfr
  2) build mpfr separately.
I think RedHat nowdays builds with --enable-mpfr in fedora, not sure about
fink.

You can also use genius without mpfr, but accuracy and speed suffers a bit.

> Also, doesn't that mean that if you install the latest GMP on any
> operating system (Linux, *BSD, whatever), you'll still get MPFR?

See above

George

-- 
George <jirka_at_5z.com>
   Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
                       -- Albert Einstein