Re: ARPACK sources removed from Octave

[Ben Abbott]

On Jan 5, 2012, at 12:22 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  4-Jan-2012, John W. Eaton wrote:
> 
> | On  4-Jan-2012, Rik wrote:
> | 
> | | Alas, the new test does not fail with a bad ARPACK library.  Is there a
> | | reason to have the test written in Fortran and not C++?  The C++ version
> | | was already debugged, but if we really want the configure test in Fortran
> | | we can continue.
> | 
> | I did it to avoid issues of portability when mixing Fortran and C++.
> | For example, you appended underscores to the Fortran names, but not
> | all compilers do that.  You also used lower-case names, but some
> | Fortran compilers use translate the Fortran function names to upper
> | case.  Then there are different conventions for passing character
> | strings.  So to make the test work for all Fortran compilers that
> | might be used to compile ARPACK, we need to handle those issues.  It
> | seemed simpler to just avoid all that and use an all Fortran test.
> 
> I thought about this some more and realized that there are three major
> calling conventions for character arguments that we ever tried to
> support: f2c, Cray/Unicos, and MSVF (look in libcruft/misc/f77-fcn.h).
> Cray/Unicos is probably not a major issue now.  I don't know that MSVF
> was ever tested.  We don't have a configure test to enable it
> automatically.  So I checked in the following change:
> 
>  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/71e28fda7be9
> 
> It causes a configure failure on my Debian system that disables
> ARPACK.  Testing your program by hand and linking it with the ARPACK
> library that we were previously distributing works, so I think the
> test is OK.
> 
> Now the question is whether distributions will package the new ARPACK
> library so that Octave will be fully functional.
> 
> jwe


Using arpack from macports, I built and tested using stable. Everything works 
as expected.

        https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/math/arpack/Portfile

For reference, Macports builds arpack using the sources from Scilab.

        http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng

Ben