[Osi] [OSI] [Request For Comments] Discovering libraries at runtime

[Stefan Vigerske]

Hi,

it seems like you have not got any reply for a while (my excuse: 
vacation :-)). Having a possibility to load the solver library 
dynamically is a good thing.

What is your plan with the lazylpsolverlibs project? Do you want to keep 
it at google-code, contribute it to COIN-OR as a separate project, or 
even have it become a part of Osi? (There is probably not much reason 
for the latter, except that Osi would not have to check for it's presence.)

To integrate the patch into Osi, one would need to adapt it so that the 
source can still be compiled as before if the solver lib is present in 
the system.
I could probably help on the detection of lazylpsolverlibs in configure.
I don't know when the autotools update will be ready, better do not wait 
for it.

What do you think should be the next steps?

Best,
Stefan

PS: Ipopt has something similar to load a linear (equation) solver 
dynamically at runtime, but it doesn't depend on gmodule.

> Some additional comments about the patch itself:
>
> It should be obvious to anyone reading it that if you only apply it
> raw, you will be missing a lot of stuff and the code won't compile.
> You need a few additional steps. For those who are interested in
> actually testing this patch, please read my comment to the related
> ticket [1]. There is a short step by step tutorial out there.
>
> Also, I did not attempt to detect the presence of lazylpsolverlibs on
> the system in the autoconf macro. This is clearly on the TODO list,
> but first I would like to have feedback from the BuildTools project:
> Coin-Osi build system is based on old autotools macros that requires
> building former versions of autoconf/automake/libtool and I do not
> feel very comfortable with writing too much code targeting these
> versions, especially if a version update is planned soon...
>
> Installation of lazylpsolverlibs is quite trivial, but in case anyone
> wonders how to actually test whether it performed fine or not, the
> package comes with an handy tool test_lazylpsolverlibs that will try
> to load various solvers and solve problems. More information can be
> grabbed from the wiki [2].
>
> [1]: https://projects.coin-or.org/Osi/ticket/95
> [2]: https://code.google.com/p/lazylpsolverlibs/wiki/HowToSetup
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