[Pkg-octave-devel] [Pkg-scicomp-devel] The future of ARPACK and Octave

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Hello,

I removed the pkg-scicomp ML since discussions are now on the  Debian
Science mailing list.

Le jeudi 10 mars 2011 à 17:33 -0600, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso a écrit :
> Notice I'm cross posting this to the Octave and Scientific Computing
> Debian teams.
> 
> Octave recently released 3.4, and decided to bundle ARPACK with it,
> because it was unmaintained. 
I think a better solution would have been to fork the project and
release it independently of Octave to benefit to the community and share
the effort... 

> So what should be done with ARPACK? If it's really unmaintained, do we
> want to keep the Debian package?
Sure. Unmaintained does not mean bad quality ... Especially when you see
the number of rdeps [1].

>  If we do, should we rip out the
> ARPACK code from the Octave sources and patch its build system for the
> 3.4 Octave package?
Yes. Libraries must not be bundled into the package and packaged
independently.
A good way would be to see which modifications of arpack have been done
in their embedded sources and apply them to the arpack package.

Sylvestre


[1]
  Reverse Depends: feel++-apps (>= 0.90.0~svn6918-1)
  Reverse Depends: getdp (>= 2.0.0-1)
  Reverse Depends: getdp-sparskit (>= 2.1.0-1)
  Reverse Depends: libdolfin0 (>= 0.9.9-4)
  Reverse Depends: libelmersolver-6.0 (>= 5.5.0.svn.4499.dfsg-1)
  Reverse Depends: libelmersolver-6.1 (>= 5.5.0.svn.5100.dfsg-1)
  Reverse Depends: libfeel++1 (>= 0.90.0~svn6918-1)
  Reverse Depends: libigraph0 (>= 0.5.3-1)
  Reverse Depends: libslepc3.0.0 (>= 3.0.0-p7.dfsg-7.1)
  Reverse Depends: libslepc3.1 (>= 3.1-p5.dfsg-1)
  Reverse Depends: life-apps (>= 0.9.24-7)
  Reverse Depends: octave3.2 (>= 3.2.4-8)
  Reverse Depends: python-dolfin (>= 0.9.9-4)