[SciPy-dev] sparse matrix support status

[Robert Cimrman]

Jonathan Guyer wrote:
> On Oct 7, 2005, at 3:01 PM, Fernando Perez wrote:
> 
> 
>>it does seem that
>>pysparse offers extra capabilities beyond what scipy.sparse has, it 
>>would be
>>nice (I think) to fold that into the new shiny scipy.
> 
> 
> True enough. Dan Wheeler and I would be willing to look into this. We 
> presently use pysparse in FiPy because that's what we could figure out, 
> particularly for iterative solvers, but it'd simplify our lives 
> considerably if we could reduce our installation instructions to "Get 
> SciPy. Get FiPy."
> 
> Roman Geus has indicated to us that he's not interested in merging 
> pysparse into a larger suite like SciPy; he prefers individually 
> maintained small packages to large monolithic systems. He may have 
> changed his mind about that, though, and regardless, pysparse is BSD 
> licensed, so it's perfectly legal to use his code to improve 
> scipy.sparse (assuming that rigorous benchmarking determines that there 
> are, in fact, improvements to be made). We'll do some tests and, if a 
> merge is warranted, we'll run it by Roman out of courtesy.

As Travis Oliphant wrote, I would like to help, too. So let me know if 
you have a need for another hands in (as almost anybody, I did write my 
own sparce matrix implementations in past). As a side-note, I would 
really appreciate to see umfpack bindinds in scipy (if the umfpack 
licence allows that, of course) - I have made some tests (admittedly a 
long time ago) showing that, at least for my class of problems umfpack 
performed much better than superlu via pysparse. (iterative solvers are 
out of question for me.)

cheers,
r.