[SciPy-dev] arpack wrapper status

[David Cournapeau]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Jarrod Millman <millman at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I think this ticket should be closed:
> http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scipy/ticket/231
>
> I know that there is still work planned on this, but it might be more
> appropriate to create a new ticket to enhance the arpack wrapper.  It
> would also be great if Aric (or someone else) could go ahead and an
> entry to the release notes:
> http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scipy/milestone/0.7.0

Some issues were solved (mac os X segfaults, in particular), but not
everything in that ticket above has been addressed AFAIK. There is a
general issue related to arpack and other 'core' Fortran libraries
which I would like to see solved in a more general, systematic way in
scipy (after 0.7 of course).

One problem is that we need some workaround depending on the
blas/lapack we are using, and there is already code duplication in
arpack and scipy.lib and scipy.linalg (to deal with g77 vs gfortran
ABI issue, which matters on Mac OS X has the abi of their lapack/blas
is g77 but we use gfortran on this platform).

I don't know what's best, but one solution would be to push for
low-level fortran wrappers somewhere (say scipy.lib), and make use of
that everywhere else. That would be a relatively big task, though.

David