Re: GSL in octave

[Susi Lehtola]

On 07/18/2016 02:03 PM, Julien Bect wrote:
> I have pushed most of your changes to the OF repo.  You will notice that
> I have folded several of your changesets into one for clarity. Perhaps
> should you restart now from a fresh clone of the OF repo.

What do you mean by "most"?

> > Generating tests may be somewhat problematic, since the package is
> > just a wrapper around gsl, so it will be more a test of gsl than of
> > the wrapper. And there's a huge number of functions, and there's the
> > question of how to obtain reference values for the tests...
>
> Yes, the package is just a wrapper around gsl, but a few tests at least
> are needed to test that the wrapper itself works properly, don't you think?

Well yes, I guess it would be good to write up some very simple tests to 
see that the wrapper templates work properly.

> Concerning the dependencies, the DESCRIPTION file only mentions "octave
> (>= 2.9.7)".
>
> a) Can you really build on such an old release of Octave? Can anyone try
> on 3.8.x? 3.6.x?

I just tried on 3.4.6 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) and it seems to build 
just fine. But, I noticed that the version of gsl (1.13) is a bit too 
old for the wrappers to build, since some function APIs have changed in 
GSL 2.

> b) Shouldn't there be a depency on the gsl library? Which version of gsl
> do we need to require?

I guess it'd be safe to require GSL version 2. GSL version specific 
templates sound a bit too much hassle...
--
Susi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
address@hidden