Re: glpk and GLPKMEX

[John W. Eaton]

On 15-Feb-2011, Tommaso Balercia wrote:

| On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 12:31 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| 
| > | I noticed that, even in Octave 3.4, the included version of GLPKMEX is 
fairly
| > | old and binary problems cannot be handled directly from glpk (using the 
"B"
| > | type variable). Not the end of the world, but are there any plans to 
update
| > | __glpk__.cc to the latest glpkcc.cpp in GLPKMEX 2.8?
| >
| > Where do I find GLPKMEX 2.8?
| 
| The package is available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/glpkmex/
| Latest version is 2.9, sorry for mixing it up.

OK, I didn't know that this was split into a separate project.  At
some point in the past I think it was just part of the glpk sources.

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

| > | 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?

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?

In any case, I would certainly consider any patches that improved
Octaves glpk function.

| GLPKMEX is also under GPL, so should be ok. What I'm not sure about
| however is the copyright of the modified files.

If you distribute modified versions of files covered by the GPL, you
must distribute them under terms that are compatible with the GPL.

jwe