Remove TH_BINARY_BUILD?

[mgorny]

Comment:

I'm wondering if we can remove TH_BINARY_BUILD from the build scripts.

I've tried to find its origin, but it seems to have been added as a blank "sync with AnacondaRecipes". FWICS @danpetry removed it recently: AnacondaRecipes/pytorch-feedstock@d972b30

FWICS it does three things:

1. It blocks using cufile — which we patch out right now, so we could get rid of the patch if we removed it.
2. It enables "special linking" to blas — which apparently means repeating the library three times. I really have no clue why they did that, and going through history, it seems that it was like that from day one. At the time, that was the only option; however, when moving stuff around, they've added the "else" condition that links BLAS only once.
3. It adds some BLAS-related undefined symbol hack.

All things considered, I think it may be worth a try.

[danpetry]

Yeah, the description of this variable seems to be "Is it a binary build"? Which is confusing. I couldn't figure out what it was really for conceptually and removed it and things seemed to be ok. Actually it was removed quite a while ago, that commit is re-instating previous changes after a sync with conda-forge.

For whatever it's worth, pytorch set it in their build scripts

I guess the best approach, rather than keeping it around for unknown reasons, would be to remove it and then watch out for cufile/blas related issues and add it back if needed?

[mgorny]

I think it roughly meant "this is our official portable build for binary distribution".