Re: octave-3.4.0 with arpack bundled

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Mar-2011, Rafael Goncalves Martins wrote:

| Our intention is really to remove the directory
| octave-3.4.0/libcruft/arpack and patch the build system to use our
| ARPACK.

I have no problem with people doing that, and we could certainly work
to make it easy for you to build without the bundled ARPACK sources
with a --without-bundled-arpack configure switch, or something
similar.  I'm not sure exactly what it should be, but I don't want it
enabled by default, or for Octave to skip the bundled sources just
because an ARPACK library happens to be found on the system, at least
not unless we have a reliable configure time test that detects the
bugs that we have fixed that result in crashes in Octave's eigs
function.  And unfortunately, those crashes do not seem to be easily
reproducible, so I don't know how to write a reliable test for them. 

My reasoning for including the ARPACK sources with Octave was that I
didn't know of anyone actually maintaining the package, we needed to
have a serious bug fixed, and it seemed simpler to just include the
sources with Octave rather than try to point to some other location
and then tell people to build the sources separately with some
complicated set of directions that included applying patches,
hand-editing makefiles, etc.

If someone does take over maintenance of ARPACK, I'd be happy to stop
distributing it with Octave.  Until then, I think it makes more sense
to keep distributing it with Octave, the same as we do for other
relatively obscure Fortran packages like DASSL, DASPK, DASRT, ODEPACK,
SLATEC, etc.

jwe