SIGs/SciTech/Scilab

Introduction

Scilab is a package that provides a numerical analysis environment with a friendly graphical interface. This page provides information specific to the packaging of scilab for fedora as well as some of the dependencies that are currently unavailable through yum.

Status

A Scilab RPM has been proposed in Bugzilla (Bug 472639). This has not yet been approved and is awaiting several dependencies. The Scilab binary has been successfully built (locally) without online help, PVM or Matio.

Packaging

Scilab is currently not available in the fedora repositories, as a result of incomplete dependencies required for basic functionality. Notably a working jogl and gluegen RPM has not been generated to date (Nov. 2009). Several other packages for optional functionality are also not available.

Scilab 5.1

To build a functional GUI, the following packages are required, these are not available in fedora repos at this time. These dependencies are listed below.

Java GUI

• Gluegen -- Stalled package review package review.
• Jogl -- Stalled package review package review.

Package review for Gluegen + Jogl has stalled. Anyone is welcome to assist, however it requires identifying a working combination of jogl and gluegen.

• Mycae's note: The guy who writes Jogl and gluegen has recently stopped working for sun, and has moved all his code to github (jogl and gluegen). I found that these versions play nice together and actually compile a complete system , with a little bit of build patching, but segregation and installation of the components could prove tricky.

Optional functionality

• PVM -- PVM provides distributed computing functionality, this is obviously desirable in a numerical analysis package. PVM libraries are in the fedora repos. The .spec file provided with the scilab review request includes some (commented out) patches for PVM building, however these are incomplete as linker errors are caused during the build process. The patches for PVM are available here.

Scilab 5.2

Scilab 5.2.0 has been released in December 2009, however this has created some new java dependencies that must be packaged to fully implement Scilab functionality.

A preliminary SRPM is available here.

Optional - GUI

Again, although optional a GUI is almost essential to basic scilab usage.

• jgraphx - Jgraphx is a graph (edge + vertcies) library for java (Review request) This package is required for the XCos functionality in Scilab
• hdf-java - (http://www.hdfgroup.org/hdf-java-html/index.html) Hdf-java is an HDF reading interface into java, this is optionally required for Scilab HDF5 functionality and for XCos.

The following archives are not mandatory packages for hdf-java. They just extends hdfview features.

• FITS - FITS java library. (mycae: I am unclear where the original home project for this is. There appears to be at least some projects here: http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_libraries.html)
• net-cdf-java - (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/) This itself has a many java dependencies, many which are not available. Some may need to be checked for legal concerns. A quick examination of included .jar files in this projects "source" distribution shows the following might be required for packaging:

• bounce-0.14.jar
• casclient-2.1.1.jar [1]
• catalina.jar
• commons-fileupload-1.2.1.jar (jakarta-commons-fileupload?)
• ehcache-1.6.0-beta3.jar [2]
• je-3.3.62.jar
• jpeg-1.0.jar
• jpeg2000.jar
• jstl.jar [3]
• lucene-core-2.3.2.jar
• slf4j-jdk14-1.5.6.jar [4]
• slf4j-log4j12-1.5.6.jar
• spring-2.5.jar
• spring-test-2.5.jar
• spring-webmvc-2.5.jar
• standard.jar
• stax-api-1.0.1.jar [5]
• wstx-lgpl-3.2.5.jar [6]