Re: ARPACK for 3.6.0

[Rik]

On 12/13/2011 05:29 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 12-Dec-2011, Rik wrote:
>
> | Was there any decision about how to handle ARPACK and Qhull for 3.6.0? 
> | There is no bug report in the bug tracker for either item so they will
> | currently be ignored as gating items for the release.  I see the following
> | as possible actions.
> | 
> | ARPACK
> | Remove ARPACK code from Mercurial control
> | Point users to external release of ARPACK library
>
> This part I can do.
>
> | Program configure.ac to check for an external ARPACK which has the bug
> | fixes we need
>
> I don't know how to write a test to do that reliably.  As I recall,
> the failures were not predictable.
I believe there was a specific matrix that would trigger the bug from a
2006 report (http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/hall/core-matrix.oct).  But coding
this up as a C or Fortran test doesn't seem like a lot of fun.  I was
thinking of just using library version numbers. 

--Rik
>   So how can we check to be sure
> that ARPACK has the bug fix(es) we need?