[SciPy-dev] GSoC weekly report

[Alan G Isaac]

On Sat, 04 Aug 2007, dmitrey apparently wrote:
> scipy.optimize.line_search. 
> Unfortunately, that one seems to be obsolete and no maintained any more, 
> noone can (or want) answer about old_fval and old_old_fval parameters 

1. Please make a distinction between "obsolete" and "not 
   maintained".  This is not obsolete and the lack of 
   maintenance reflects its satifactory state (aside from 
   documentation).  Please see the example of use in
   the definition of fmin_bfgs
   http://svn.scipy.org/svn/scipy/trunk/Lib/optimize/optimize.py
2. Your problem certainly is showing the inadequacy of 
   documentation of this code.  However the two old function 
   values are being used to compute an initial step, as 
   documented at 
   http://svn.scipy.org/svn/scipy/trunk/Lib/optimize/minpack2/dcsrch.f
   The documentation there is quite good.
   The line search code is essentially an interface to the 
   dcsrch code.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac