[SciPy-Dev] SciPy Goal

[Benny Malengier]

I'll jump in the discussion.

As author of the odes scikit, I'd like to note that we moved
development to github for the normal reasons,
https://github.com/bmcage/odes
We work on a cython implementation of the sundials solvers we need (I
discussed with the pysundials author, and they effectively have no
more time to work on that except to keep it doing for what they use
it), and are experimenting with the API. When we finalize this work,
I'll ask to remove the svn version from the old servers. My co-worker
on this hates the scikit namespace, but for now, it is still in.

The reason for the scikit and not patches to integrate are as before:
dependency on sundials. I do think the (c)vode solver in scipy is too
old-fashioned, and should better be replaced by the current vode
solver of sundials. So I would urge that some thoughts are given if
those parts of scipy.integrate really should make it in a 1.0 version.

Another issue with the odes scikit is that nobody seems to know how
the API for ODE or DAE is best done, different fields have their own
typically workflow. So just doing it as it is usefull for my
applicatoins seems like the fastest way forward, and if a broader
community is interested, we can discuss. Also, I can change the API of
my own things, but to find time to change ode class in scipy.integrate
would be difficult (I don't have a fixed position).

Benny

PS:  For those interested, you can see the API for DAE from
https://github.com/bmcage/odes/blob/master/scikits/odes/sundials/ida.pyx
. I would think the main annoyance would be that the equations must be
passed to the init method as a class ResFunction due to
performance/technical reasons, which is not very scipy like. That
however would be for another mail thread, which I'll do at another
time. Odes does not have it's own mailing list at the moment.