Re: octave-3.4.0 with arpack bundled

[Søren Hauberg]

fre, 11 03 2011 kl. 12:59 +0200, skrev Jussi Lehtola:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:14:35 -0300
> Rafael Goncalves Martins <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 8:32 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > My reasoning for including the ARPACK sources with Octave was that I
> > > didn't know of anyone actually maintaining the package, we needed to
> > > have a serious bug fixed, and it seemed simpler to just include the
> > > sources with Octave rather than try to point to some other location
> > > and then tell people to build the sources separately with some
> > > complicated set of directions that included applying patches,
> > > hand-editing makefiles, etc.
> > 
> > My personal opinion is that you guys should just ship a custom arpack
> > tarball if the upstream one isn't good enough, so the other projects
> > using arpack can benefit from your patches as well.
> 
> "A tarball" isn't enough IMHO. What you want is a decent project with
> version control and VCS access, (hopefully) also for people who aren't
> interested in Octave. Starting one on e.g. Google Code or
> SourceForge is a task that takes a minute.
> 
> You should have the site up and running in less than 15 minutes.
> 
> > I can spend hours here talking about why bundled libraries are evil,
> > but my mate Diego Pettenò already did the hard work:
> > http://blog.flameeyes.eu/tag/bundledlibraries
> > 
> > Please read at least some of the posts and take your own conclusions.
> 
> For thorough review of why bundled libraries shouldn't be used, you can
> read
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries

I think everybody agrees that having ARPACK properly maintained as a
separate project would be ideal. If somebody volunteers to do this, then
great! Until then, we have to take the approach that requires less
resources from an already understaffed project. I'd say that approach is
bundling ARPACK with Octave.

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