Since version 260.19.12, upstream developers of nvidia-utils dropped C headers for OpenCL and Cuda. After a discussion with Ionuț on IRC, we agreed that it would be good to ask other developers on the best way to provide these headers. For those unfamiliar with these programming languages/libraries, there are part of the so-called GPGPU technologies (General-Purpose Processing on Graphical Processing Unit), where the primary objective is to perform any type of parallel computing on graphics processors. For example, I am using OpenCL in a personal programming project to speed up a partial differential equation solver. OpenCL is an open standard that has been recently (May 2009) ratified by The Khronos Group. C for Cuda is a similar proprietary solutions from Nvidia. Nvidia-utils contains the dynamic libraries for both OpenCL and Cuda. Other vendors, like AMD and Intel, provide or will provide soon an implementation of OpenCL for their GPUs. To get a satisfactory OpenCL developement environment, it could be as simple as creating a new package that provide the header files. These headers can be either downloaded from The Khronos Group[1] (like this [2]) or extracted from the Nividia toolkit[3]. However, for Cuda, it might be a little more complicated because it must use a compiler provided by nvidia (nvcc). A solution may be to create a package for the Cuda Toolkit. The main disadvantage of this solution is the addition of proprietary software for which we can only provide limited support in case of bugs or incompatibility with other updates. According to the maintainer of the Cuda package in AUR [4], Cuda requires gcc version 4.4 (it is broken with version 4.5) and sometimes releases depend on beta drivers[5]. I think it is probably better to wait until these dependency problems are fixed before thinking about inclusion in [extra] or [community]. My suggestion would be to package only OpenCL headers (Khronos version) and eventually discuss addition of Cuda if it becomes easier to maintain in a rolling release distribution. The new "khronos-opencl-headers" package could be added as optional dependencies for nvidia-utils which will also include a "provides=('libCL')"[6]. I tested this solution on several codes and it works well. It also seems that Debian is going to do something very similar[7]. So what do other people think about this problem ? Stéphane [1] http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl [2] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=35367 [3] http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_toolkit_rc.html [4] http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=3D23597 [5] Personnal communication [6] cf. FS#20558 [7] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/khronos-opencl- headers_1.0-2010.06.13-1.html