Re: glpk and GLPKMEX

[Tommaso Balercia]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 7:43 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

> | The package is available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/glpkmex/
> | Latest version is 2.9, sorry for mixing it up.

> I can't seem to browse or check out files from the CVS archive on
> Source Forge for this project.

You can download the sources manually from the site.

> | > | I diffed the two files,
> | > | the required changes seem to be fairly marginal at a first skim,
>
> Looking at the files in the glpkmex-2.9-src.zip file, I only see a MEX
> file, not an Octave file (with a DEFUN), so what kind of diff did you
> do?

I suppose you tried to download the file from a Windows machine. By
default, in that case, I think the sites just provides you with the
mex file. Just go in "Files" in the site tab and then get release 2.9.
When you open the archive, you'll see, among others, the following
files

glpk.m
glpkmex.m
glpkcc.cpp

Those can be found in Octave too; the first two under the same name,
the last under __glpk__.cc. I diffed those files. Of course the actual
syntax is different, but the logic is quite similar.

> In any case, I guess I should give you some history as I remember it.
> At some point, a MEX file interface was added to the glpk sources.  I
> discussed adding an interface to Octave, and the author (Nicolo'
> Giorgetti) agreed, and we added it to Octave, converting it to use
> Octave's native DEFUN interface instead of MEX, which was not
> available in Octave at the time) and also to rename the function glpk
> instead of glpkmex (or glpktoct as I think Nicolo' used initially -- I
> saw no reason for the type of file to be embedded in the name of the
> function).  I also thought we had some kind of agreement about
> supporting Octave first, not Matlab (after all glpk is also a GNU
> project, so shouldn't it support Octave over Matlab?).  I'm not sure
> what happened since then.  When was this project split from glpk?

I see, the point is that Nicolò isn't following GLPKMEX any longer. I
don't know, but sounds likely that when he left GLPKMEX, he also
abandoned Octave. So this answers my question, nobody is actually
taking care of this interface. It's a pity because some nice
functionalities of the latest versions of glpk are not exposed at all
by the current interface.

Tommaso