[SciPy-dev] linalg.eigh tests - commit permissions?

[Tiziano Zito]

dear devs, 

I am working on the integration of symeig in scipy as a replacement
for eigh. As a first step I wrote some tests for eigh, which was not
tested till now. It would be better if these tests could be
committed before anything else, so that even if symeig integration
fails for some reason, eigh gets tested anyway. Who should I ask 
for commit privileges to the scipy svn repo? Alternatively, I can 
send a patch here or on scipy Track.

The two utility functions "symrand" (generate a random symmetric
positive definite matrix) and "random_rot" (generate a random
rotation matrix) are in test_decomp.py, let me know if you want them
available somewhere else in scipy. I think they are useful enough to
be put somewhere, what about directly under scipy.linalg?

some other random questions:

- the signature for eigh currently is:
  eigh(a, lower=True, eigvals_only=False, overwrite_a=False)

  because eigh will grow an additional optional argument "b" (the
  second matrix of a general eigenproblem), the "overwrite_a"
  argument should become "overwrite": "b" will be also overwritten.
  Is this too much of an API breakage?

- in the eigh code I see snippets like this:
    
   if heev.module_name[:7] == 'flapack':
        lwork = calc_lwork.heev(heev.prefix,a1.shape[0],lower)
        w,v,info = heev(a1,lwork = lwork,...
   else # 'clapack'
        w,v,info = heev(a1,...

  what is 'clapack'? how can I test it? I work on a debian system 
  with atlas installed and the 'flapack' branch is always run. why
  has clapack no "lwork" argument? is it important at all? 


thank you!

tiziano