Increasing Minimum Required LAPACK Version

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

On 10/04/16 08:25, Ian Henriksen wrote:
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.
Apple's Accerate Framework is only providing 3.2.1 (actually CLAPACK, not LAPACK). Sturla
participants (2)
-
Ian Henriksen
-
Sturla Molden