Re: [Help-gsl] Linear least squares, webpages and the next release

[Rhys Ulerich]

Apologies for being out of touch...

> 1. Is anyone out there using GSL besides me?

Since defending, I've not been using GSL on a consistent basis.  Both
I and my advisor's next student made heavy use of the B-spline
routines.  He went on for a postdoc and is still employing them
constantly.

> 2. What functionality would you like to see added to GSL?

I can't sign up for the work, but I think making GSL follow something
like the gnulib module system could be very powerful.  For background,
gnulib is comprised of a collection of modules with programmatic
dependencies.  You say you want some capability imported into a
project via gnulib, and gnulib plugs it into your build system along
with any of its prereqs.  No external compilation/linking is
necessary.

> 3. Are you willing to develop and contribute the features you want?

No, sadly.  Always thought that modularization would be fun but the
day job eats up too much time.

> 4. Would you like to see a quick release of GSL v2.0, or are you content to 
> work off the git repository?

2.0 is worth getting into the wild.  It's been a long time since a
formal release.

- Rhys

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Mohammad Akhlaghi
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 1. Is anyone out there using GSL besides me? :-)
>
> The GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) extensively use GSL,
> for example the the FFT routines (for convolution), the
> random number generators (for making simulated noise or
> random sampling). GSL is a great asset and we hope to use
> it much more as Gnuastro grows and evolves, it is still
> in its infancy. Thanks for the great work.
>
>
>
> 2. What functionality would you like to see added to GSL?
>
> Nothing special in the short term.
>
>
>
> 3. Are you willing to develop and contribute the features you want?
>
> Ofcourse.
>
> Gnuastro also has internal libraries for managing common
> functions to more than one utility. We are planning to
> convert them (and other useful functions) to shared/installable
> libraries to be used by the astronomers (currently Gnuastro only
> installs executables) in their separate programming projects. We
> will use GSL's model for the creation of those libraries.
>
> If the libraries might be useful for the larger (non-astronomer)
> community of scientists, then we would be happy to move those
> libraries to GSL after they have been used/tested in Gnuastro and
> passed the tests of the GSL maintainers. Since Gnuastro links to GSL
> anyway, it won't make any difference for us where those libraries are
> positioned.
>
>
>
>
> 4. Would you like to see a quick release of GSL v2.0, or are you content
> to work off the git repository?
>
> In the short term (while Gnuastro is still under heavy development),
> the official release of GSL is the best for us. Gnuastro's programs
> link to GSL which has to be installed by Gnuastro's users separately.
> So as others have already mentioned, we will have to rely on the released
> versions, not the git repo. So more frequent releases would be better
> for us.
>
> Thanks a lot for the great effort in managing this wonderful and very
> fundamental library.
>
> Mohammad
>