[SciPy-Dev] Increasing Minimum Required LAPACK Version

[Ian Henriksen]

Hi everyone,
I've opened a pull request (https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/6051) to
increase the
minimum required LAPACK version to 3.3.1 rather than 3.1.0.

Here's some context. 3.1.0 was released on November 12, 2006. 3.3.1 was
released on April 18 2011. 3.3.1 is also the LAPACK version available by
default on
the Travis CI build workers.

There are several advantages to doing this. It lets us avoid running into
bugs in
older LAPACK versions (one example is
https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/5039). It also allows us to add a
significant
number of LAPACK routines to the Cython LAPACK API. The Cython LAPACK API
consists of the routines common to all supported LAPACK versions.
Increasing the
minimum requirement all the way up to 3.3.1 gives us access to most of the
new
routines added between 3.1.0 and 3.3.1. A full list of the routines this
adds is
available in the pull request.

The main change I expect this to make for users is that people using systems
sufficiently old to not have LAPACK 3.3.1 available through the package
manager
will now have to build LAPACK from source rather than linking against the
LAPACK
provided by their operating system. Given that systems that old are
becoming less
common and that many people use more recent optimized implementations of
BLAS and LAPACK, I expect that this won't impact a huge number of people.

Is this a change that makes sense to everyone?

Best,
Ian Henriksen
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