Introduction
Scilab is a package that provides a numerical analysis environment. This page provides information specific to the package 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 pushed into RPM testing, and is awaiting several dependencies. Currently owing to dependency constraints, scilab requires f10+ for the online help modules. The Scilab binary has been successfully built (locally) without online help, PVM or Matio.
Packaging
At time of writing (24th Nov 2008), Scilab utilises several libraries that are currently not available in the fedora repositories. These missing dependencies provide optional, but mostly very desirable functionality to the Scilab package.
Requirements
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
- Javahelp2 -- Pushed into rawhide (F10?) Bug 439263. May require building for F9?
- JRosetta -- Currently under package review
- Gluegen -- Currently under package review.
- Jogl -- Currently under package review.
- Flexdock -- Currently under package review.
Internal help & documentation
The internal help provides users with a ready reference for scilab commands and general usage. This is an optional, but desirable package.
- JEuclid -- Currently no available package. There does exist a patchset maintained for Debian here this resource may help speed up the RPM development. Finally JEuclid utilises the maven2 build system, which is significantly different to the ant based systems. Note that due to the design of maven2, which assumes it has an internet connection to pull things from, you must, among other restrictions use mvn-jpp, rather than mvn to build the package (see here).
--I (bashton) have JEuclid up for package review right now, only one patch out of the Debian set is necessary and just comments out the call for FreeHep. I just patched the necessary changes to the build.xml so ant works and none of the mvn stuff in required. ReviewRequest
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.
- Matio -- Provides a library that allows scilab to read the "Matlab" proprietary package's data files. Would be advantageous for users migrating from a matlab environment. Review request.