Re: fsolve test failure

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Jan-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| Technically, there is no incompatibility.

I'd say, that technically there is, because optimset returns different
things.  But in practice, I agree that you are right that this
probably won't matter.  I seem to keep forgetting that even though
Octave's optimset returns an empty structure, you can add fields to
it.  So if someone has done this in some Matlab code, it will stil
work with Octave.  It only matters if someone calls optimset and
expects to see a get a non-empty structure and then wants to do
something with those fields.  I guess this won't happen often.

| a field directly, and if you use invalid case, the field will be
| silently ignored. We can only try to be smarter than Matlab, and, for
| instance, check for the condition in optimget, but I think we should
| discourage direct manipulation of the struct anyway.

Yes, I agree.

| __all_opts__ ('optimfunc')
| 
| will call optimfunc('defaults') and then add all the options.

OK.  Should this be done with a function handle?  Maybe it doesn't
matter.

| > Maybe instead of including the initial list directly in
| > fzero, fsolve lsqnonneg, these should also be added using PKG_ADD?
| > Then each of these functions would not have special treatment, and the
| > PKG_ADD line in each of them would serve as an example of how to
| > properly add an optimization function to the list.
| 
| That's a good idea. I forgot Octave can have its own PKG_ADD commands.
| This also simplifies the function nicely. So, right now,
| optimization/PKG_ADD contains
| __all_opts__ ("fzero", "fsolve", "lsqnonneg");
| which registers all their options.

Instead of creating the PKG_ADD file by hand, you should add

  ## PKG_ADD: __all_opts__ ("fsolve");

to each file that needs to do something like this.  That way if
someone later adds a PKG_ADD directive to some other file in the
optimization directory, you won't lose the contents of your
hand-edited PKG_ADD file.  I made this change and removed the PKG_ADD
file from the source tree.

Thanks,

jwe