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

[Stefan Vigerske]

Hi,

> 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.

There is the Ipopt configure option --with-mumps-dir to specify the
location of a separately compiled MUMPS. So, if you do not have a MUMPS
in ThirdParty but specify this flag, then Ipopts configure should use
the MUMPS from there.

> 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.

Yes, you are right. :-)

Stefan