Hi Giacomo, which version of stable are you currently using? Not wheezy at the moment?
The current petsc in unstable/testing is 3.6.4 (soon to be updated to 3.7). slepc is closely bound to petsc of course (also v3.6 moving soon to 3.7) wheezy fails on these petsc build-depends: mpi-default-dev (>= 1.0.2) (wheezy has 1.0.1) libsuitesparse-dev (>= 1:4.2.1) (wheezy has 1:3.4.0-3) These differences make it difficult (in terms of developer time resources) to backport. But if you have the time, it should be possible for you to hack the build scripts, debian/control and debian/rules. For instance you could remove support for suitesparse. petsc 3.6.4.dfsg1-3 does build fine on jessie. You should be able to build a custom deb package without too much trouble: apt-get build-dep petsc apt-get install pkg-config libssl-dev # new build-deps Download the new petsc source, e.g. the 3 source files listed at https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/petsc Unpack: dpkg-source -x petsc_3.6.4.dfsg1-3.dsc Enter the petsc source dir and build the packages with dpkg-buildpackage or dpkg-buildpackage 2>&1 | tee ../build.log If petsc builds fine then the analogous steps should allow slepc to build too.
