Re: porting arapck code to octave

[David Bateman]

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 6:15 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
>   
> > Are we going to include arpack sources in Octave?  I'd prefer to leave
> > it as an external dependency unless there is some good reason to do
> > otherwise.
> >
> >     
>
> The only reason is probably availability - if a GNU/Linux distro
> doesn't provide ARPACK as a package, then it will probably provide
> Octave without eigs unless someone volunteers to maintain ARPACK for
> that distro. It's not a strong reason, probably.
>
>   

Yes the ARPACK website no longer seems to be maintained. Viral Shah sent 
me a whole set of patches for ARPACK in 2006 that he and Chao Yang (a 
co-author of ARPACK) wrote. The link to the website these lived on 
however seems to be broken..

I cc'ed both Chao and and Viral Shah at the addresses I had with the 
hope of getting through to them and see what their thoughts are about 
future support of ARPACK now that the license has changed to a two 
clause BSD license. This gives them the possibility of publicly 
releasing their patches.  If they are unwilling to support a download 
site for these patches, maybe a distribution such as debian might be 
willing to host the patches directly..

I agree  with John that it is best that Octave doesn't host its own copy 
of arpack however.

Regards
David

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