[SciPy-dev] sparse matrix support status

[Jonathan Guyer]

On Oct 7, 2005, at 3:01 PM, Fernando Perez wrote:

> it does seem that
> pysparse offers extra capabilities beyond what scipy.sparse has, it 
> would be
> nice (I think) to fold that into the new shiny scipy.

True enough. Dan Wheeler and I would be willing to look into this. We 
presently use pysparse in FiPy because that's what we could figure out, 
particularly for iterative solvers, but it'd simplify our lives 
considerably if we could reduce our installation instructions to "Get 
SciPy. Get FiPy."

Roman Geus has indicated to us that he's not interested in merging 
pysparse into a larger suite like SciPy; he prefers individually 
maintained small packages to large monolithic systems. He may have 
changed his mind about that, though, and regardless, pysparse is BSD 
licensed, so it's perfectly legal to use his code to improve 
scipy.sparse (assuming that rigorous benchmarking determines that there 
are, in fact, improvements to be made). We'll do some tests and, if a 
merge is warranted, we'll run it by Roman out of courtesy.