[Coin-ipopt] MUMPS 'independent' package for use with IPOPT

[John Pye]

Hi all,

I have been working on improving my RPM package for IPOPT so that it
could be submitted for inclusion in Linux distros such as Fedora and
SUSE. One major obstacle is that IPOPT provides 'configure' and 'make'
actions for MUMPS that AFAICT are not built into the original MUMPS tarball.

Is there any way that a patch for the original MUMPS tarball could be
provided, so that one could first build MUMPS and install it, then,
entirely separately, unpack the IPOPT tarball, detect the installed
version of MUMPS, and use that to build IPOPT? This approach that I
describe is that which is required when submitting packages for
inclusion in the linux distros; it is not allowed for a package to
compile its own 'private' copy of a dependency as is currently done in
the IPOPT build process.

I'm sure this is possible, I just wondered if the person responsible for
integrating MUMPS into IPOPT might be able to help out with a patch for
MUMPS that would simplify this task for me.

Down the track, it would be nice if the matrix solver(s) used by IPOPT
could be runtime-switchable, so that a single copy of IPOPT could be
used to run off MUMPS, PARDISO, HSL, etc. I believe that this is still a
way off, however? It would make a pre-compiled version of IPOPT much
more useful to end users.

Cheers
JP