Re: octave-3.4.0 with arpack bundled

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 8 March 2011 18:07, Rafael Goncalves Martins
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> As a source-based linux distribution, we have some concerns about
> software shipped with bundled libraries. Jordi said to me at #octave
> that your guys are bundling arpack because it's unmaintained, but we
> think that would be better if you guys start maintaining arpack
> without just ship it with octave, because other people using arpack
> would benefit from your patches and we wouldn't need to patch octave's
> build system to use arpack from the system.

I originally suggested to Rafael to bring up this issue on the dev
mailing list, because he said that the Gentoo maintainer of ARPACK was
actually giving it upstream maintenance. So the bug that Octave
patched in ARPACK when it decided to ship it was, AIUI, also being
patched in Gentoo. So Gentoo doesn't want to give up its version of
ARPACK, unbundled the version in Octave, and that's what they're
using.

So I thought this might mean that perhaps we should reconsider the
decision to bundle ARPACK? If apparently someone *is* maintaining it,
and if the library could be used outside of Octave, perhaps we should
be pooling those efforts instead?

This is just on what Rafael told me about the status of ARPACK in
Gentoo. I don't know if it actually means that ARPACK is getting
maintenance or not.

- Jordi G. H.