RE: ARPACK situation

[Lehoucq, Richard]

Jordi,

Thank you for your well articulated email. ARPACK is the property of Rice 
University and so any "upstream" decision ultimately resides with Rice. 

I thank all the users who have made many improvements to ARPACK over the years. 

--rich

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Richard B. Lehoucq                             address@hidden
Sandia National Labs                           (505) 845-8929
PO Box 5800, ms 1320                           fax: (505) 845-7442
Albuquerque, NM 87185-1320                     Org: 1444
http://www.sandia.gov/~rblehou
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Jordi
> Gutiérrez Hermoso
> Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2011 2:27 PM
> To: address@hidden; Lehoucq, Richard; Kristi Maschhoff;
> address@hidden; address@hidden
> Cc: address@hidden; Octave Maintainers List; Debian Scientific
> Computing Team; Christophe Prud'homme; address@hidden; Justin
> Lecher; John W. Eaton; Rik; David Bateman; Jussi Lehtola; scipy-
> address@hidden; Rafael Goncalves Martins; address@hidden;
> address@hidden
> Subject: ARPACK situation
> 
> (Mass email, please hit reply-all to keep everyone abreast of the
> situation. May get some bounces from mailing lists.)
> 
> I'm writing this email to discuss the future of ARPACK. The problem is
> this: it's a widely-used library, but it seems abandoned upstream (and
> upstream, to whom this is addressed, can confirm or deny). This has
> resulted in the problem of many mini-forks as each organisation
> distributes ARPACK patches its own way, and very often, for the same
> bugs. These are the ones I could find:
> 
>      http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/tip/libcruft/arpack/
>      http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/arpack/2.1+parpack96.dfsg-3
>      https://github.com/inducer/arpack
>      http://mathema.tician.de/software/arpack
>      http://dev.gentoo.org/~bicatali/
>      http://pkgs.org/centos-5-rhel-5/epel-x86_64/arpack-2.1-
> 13.el5.x86_64.rpm.html
> 
> https://github.com/scipy/scipy/tree/fa21e840ad69fbac7ff600a7ef2b36929c18b975
> /scipy/sparse/linalg/eigen/arpack
>      http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~igraph/igraph/0.5-
> main/files/1139.1.143/src/arpack/
> 
> Additionally, the Mathworks (they make Matlab) probably also has their
> own version of ARPACK, but I wasn't able to find a public version of
> it, nor an email to send them questions to. If someone could contact
> them, it would be nice to let them know.
> 
> These all seem to have modified ARPACK in some way, with minor or
> major bugfixes, and as far as I can tell, have mostly done so
> independently. To me, this seems like unnecessary work, if we're all
> patching the library again and again and making our own private forks.
> What I therefore propose is to have some sort of central location for
> it and we all pool our efforts on this one location. I think it would
> be easiest to use Andreas Klöckner's existing fork on github, since
> this requires the least maintenance and work from anyone. All that it
> requires for now is for each of the people above to see what patches
> they have made and transplant them to the git repo.
> 
> It would be helpful if upstream could confirm that they are happy with
> ARPACK development continuing on github and mention this on the ARPACK
> webpage, so that new people who are interested on ARPACK can be
> redirected.
> 
> Thanks,
> - Jordi G. H.
>   GNU Octave developer