>
> (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