[Matrix-SIG] Multipack is growing....

[Travis Oliphant]

Many of you have noticed that I have been quite active on this list for
quite a little while releasing several different packages all aimed to be
quite general.  

My goal in doing this has been mainly to satisfy my own needs, but by 
releasing incremental updates in a variety of areas I have also saught to
generate interest in adding some computational facilities to Numeric to
make it attractive as an interactive data analysis environment.  This is
the idea recently advocated by Joe Harrington and tossed around a bit on
this list several months ago.  

The conclusions I drew from that discussion was that while a general,
scripting-language-independent approach was certainly a laudable
ultimate goal, it would be difficult to know how to proceed without a
reference implementation which gathered some of the available code
together into Python first.

That is basically what I've been trying to do over the past several
months.  As I mentioned in an earlier announcement, Pearu Peterson has
graciously made available a CVS server where development of Multipack is
occuring.  I've decided to incorporate all of my packages into the
umbrella of Multipack due to some significant changes that Pearu has made
to the organization of that module which allows for its extensibility.

For example the CVS version of Multipack now has the spline packages from
ddierckx (fitpack) which were contributed by Pearu and will soon (over
the next few months) contain cddlib, an enhanced FFTW interface, and a
sparse matrix toolbox.  After that an optimization toolbox is planned (by
me at least) and later a wavelet toolbox.   I am also planning on
distributing Janko Hausers' wonderful interactive processing shell along
with this package.

The reason that I am posting this message is to let those of you who
were/are interested in contributing to make Python into a "real"
interactive data analysis package know that your contributions are
welcome.  Even if all you can do is look at the package and say,  "Hey,
the way you implement XXX is stupid, you should do it like this..." it
would be appreciated.  Of course real source code contributions are even
more appreciated.  One area that will need continued help, of course, is
cross-platform portability.

The license I've decided on for my code is the LGPL. 

Eventually I could see placing LinearAlgebra, RandomArray, and FFT all
under the Multipack umbrella and leaving Numeric to hold the objects
themselves with their methods.  This is a very tentative eventually, of
course, and for now isn't worth the effort.

Comments encouraged,

Travis Oliphant