ARPACK soname bump [Was Re: ARPACK - Change of upstream]

[Jussi Lehtola]

On Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:41:13 +0000
José Matos <jamatos at fc.up.pt> wrote:
> On 12/11/2011 06:46 PM, Jussi Lehtola wrote:
> > ARPACK used to be a project at Rice University [1], but they
> > abandoned it many years ago. After that many projects (e.g. Octave
> > and Scilab) started bundling their own patched versions of the
> > software to fix the bugs they had found in the package. The Fedora
> > and Debian packages had their own patches as well.
> >
> > Recently, a collaboration has picked up the pieces and started
> > maintaining a new fork of ARPACK [2].
> >
> > Can I just change the arpack package to use the new tarballs, or
> > does using them require a re-review of the software?
> >
> > [1] http://www.caam.rice.edu/software/ARPACK/
> > [2] http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng/
> 
> What is the prospect of adoption from those packages that use arpack?
> 
> If the new package becomes the de-facto upstream for arpack I would
> say that it does not need a new review it is just the upstream url
> source that has changed.

As the new project ships a maintained, up-to-date version, the need for
bundling bug-fixed versions of ARPACK has disappeared and the projects
have started to unbundle their own flavors of ARPACK.

On the Fedora side, we'll just drop any patches currently present in
the ARPACK package (which have become part of the new upstream release)
and rebuild.

If no-one disagrees to the procedure, I'll push the new version to
rawhide as soon as upstream adds the missing libtool script in the
tarball.

Furthermore, since the library is only used by freefem++, I might as
well push the version to other branches, too, so that removing the
bundles can be done in them as well.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org