[Coin-discuss] Development branch merged back into main branch

[Laszlo Ladanyi]

Hello,

There is a big change in those parts of repository that are related to
integer programming: the development branch has matured to be the main
branch. The main changes:

- Clp, a simplex based robust LP solver is available from COIN.

- Library autodetection is gone. It was very painful. Rather the user
  has to edit COIN/Makefiles/Makefile.location to specify the location
  of each used library.

- Pieces that can be used in any project (like messaging, packed
  vector, etc.) are moved into a separate library (libCoin.so). This
  also have the advantage of eliminating a circular dependency. Clp was
  dependent on OsiMessage (among other Osi stuff) while Osi was
  dependent on Clp. Now Clp is dependent on Coin and Osi is dependent on
  Coin and Clp.

- The Osi library structure is different. Instead of creating one
  libOsi.so that interfaces to every solver libOsi.so contains only the
  generic methods and each solver has its own libOsiOsl.so,
  etc. created.  This way when a final executable is linked, one does
  not have to link in every library that was present when libOsi.so was
  created, only the actually used ones must be linked in. E.g., if only
  Clp and Vol is used (even though Cpx and Osl is defined in
  Makefile.location) then the link command will have
    -lOsiClp -lClp -lOsiVol -lVol -lOsi
  Look at the examples for how to automate this in the Makefiles.

- g++-3.2 is supported

- glpk is supported through Osi

Caveats:

- I have built everything on Linux only. Also I have tested most
  things, but I'm sure I forgot a couple of things...

If you are using some of these pieces please grab the new code and try
to compile/run things and let us know if anything breaks.

Thanks,
--Laci