Octave add-on packages

Quentin Spencer qspencer at ieee.org
Tue Feb 22 15:36:13 UTC 2005


Hello all,

I'm joining this list because I'm interested in maintaining some add-on 
packages for octave in Fedora Extras. Octave (currently in Fedora Core) 
is a high-level language for numerical computation that is mostly 
compatible with Matlab. Matlab (a commercial product) is distributed as 
a base package plus a large set of add-on "toolboxes" that serve 
specific needs for different users. The Octave user community has 
duplicated some of these, which are distributed in the octave-forge 
package (octave.sourceforge.net). For a while now I have built my own 
RPM versions of octave-forge, and I would like to see them become part 
of Fedora Extras, since they are becoming increasingly necessary for the 
octave user community.

I have a few related questions. The first is regarding octave itself. I 
never use the Core octave packages for two reasons. First is that I like 
to keep up with the latest developments in octave, but more imporantly, 
octave is capable of linking to some improved libraries like FFTW and 
ATLAS (math-atlas.sourceforge.net). Support for FFTW is as simple as 
rebuilding the package with FFTW present on the system (I haven't 
figured out how to distribute ATLAS yet because it requires compile-time 
optimizations). However, FFTW is in Extras. I'm wondering what is the 
best way of dealing with this. I see three possibilities: (1) maintain a 
separate Octave in Extras with FFTW support, (2) move FFTW into Core, or 
(3) move octave into Extras. I think option 3 makes the most sense, 
particularly since octave has a relatively small user base (it may also 
make sense to do the same with the blas and lapack libraries--there are 
likely not many other programs that use them).

My second question related to FFTW is why the Extras version is so old 
(2.1.5), when version 3.0.1 has been out for nearly 2 years. Octave 
supports only FFTW version 3. I recall freshrpms used to have a fftw3 
package but it has been dropped. Is there less interest in version 3?

I would like to begin with a basic version of octave-forge (this could 
be built for just the basic octave package in Core initially). 
Eventually, as time permits, there are some optional dependencies that 
could be added for symbolic math.

Regards,
Quentin Spencer




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