[Matrix-SIG] Re: Lapack, fftpack, and ranlib becoming part of Multipack

[Paul F. Dubois]

On Mon, 07 Jun 1999, you wrote:
>...
> 
> As Paul seemed to think that moving these out of the Numeric core will
> simplify his life as the maintainer of NumPy (a good thing...) then I will
> proceed.  

Don't do anything yet. We need to get a release out first.

> 
> My preferred approach is to rely on full lapack libraries.  Are these
> available for Windows?  I would also like to have binary releases for
> several platforms but will need help getting those together from
> interested users.  Any entrepeneur out there willing to put together
> CD-ROM's of binaries of what this package will be?  I think many people
> would be interested in binary copies and be willing to pay a small fee for
> it...

The version in NumPy is a C version of a portion of LAPACK and it is badly
written; produces many warning errors. It should be possible to get the full
LAPACK from www.netlib.org.  However, one of the "bugs" we have had trouble
with is that on a platform that already has LAPACK you should use the native
version, which often has optimized BLAS.

I think thereare separate jobs here: maintaining and distributing the source, and making and
distributing binaries for different platforms.  Let's hope disutils takes are
of the compiling issues so that the latter job becomes something easy.

Paul