[SciPy-dev] gsl and scipy

[arnd.baecker at physik.uni-ulm.de]

On 3 May 2002, Jochen Küpper wrote:

> On Fri, 3 May 2002 11:46:51 +0200 (MEST) arnd baecker wrote:
>
> arnd> I know of pygsl (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pygsl/)
> arnd> which at present only covers a small part of gsl.
>
> Feel free to contribute...

Well, I am not sure if I know enough about all this yet
(leaving alone the time aspect ... ;-). My impression is
that gsl would be worth the effort.

> arnd> It seems that some of the functionality of gsl is already within
> arnd> scipy - does this mean that we would end up with different
> arnd> routines doing the same things ...?
>
> Yep.  But that isn't a bad thing by itself.

Indeed, not at all - having different algorithms
is sometimes quite helpful...

[...]

> The problem some people might see is that GSL is GPL'ed software.  You
> cannot put it under a BSD license.  But you can of course provide it
> as an optional scipy-module to people that are happy with GPL.

Hmm, coming from the academic world this licensing stuff appears
annoying to me.

So this basically means, that pygsl will stay separate
from scipy, right ?
In principle this should be no big deal for those who have no
problems with the different licenses.
(it just means that there will be another package out there
with a substantial overlap of scipy's funtionality, according
to the very helpful comparison by Travis).

Personally I think that (at least for me) it boils down
how much time it would cost to write a full wrapper for gsl
(this seems also relevant for future upgrades of gsl).
If most of this could be done automatically, this would be optimal.
Are there any example scripts for f2py2e which could be used to wrap some
bigger library in an automatic way ?
((I havn't had a detailed look at f2py2e, but at first sight
I could not find it ...))

Arnd