On 11/22/2009 octave-dev-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote:
> Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:38:07 -0500 From: "Steven G. Johnson"
<snip>
> 
> Well, it depends what you mean by "integrate".  Certainly, 
> licensewise I think there should be no problem (LGPL), and as I said
> NLopt already comes with an Octave plugin, so you could certainly
> just ship it as-is with the Octave-forge optimization package if you
> wanted to.
> 
> It would be easy to modify functions like fminunc etcetera to call 
> NLopt under the hood.   However, NLopt seems to provide much more 
> functionality than the interfaces of your optimization package 
> currently provide, because it allows nonlinear constraints and global
>  optimization, so I'm not sure you would want to "bury" it inside 
> other functions exclusively.
> 
> Also, I should say that the philosophy of NLopt seems to be a bit 
> different from that of the optimization package in octave-forge.  In
>  the optimization package, you provide separate interfaces for
> different algorithms like BFGS and Nelder-Mead.  NLopt, on the other
> hand, tries to provide a single interface for all the algorithms,
> with the algorithm specified as a parameter.  (Of course, some
> algorithms are more limited than others; e.g. if you specify
> nonlinear constraints with an algorithm that only supports bound
> constraints, it will return an error code.)
> 
> (NLopt is designe for general nonlinear optimization, so it is 
> probably suboptimal for particualr convex cases that have specialized
>  algorithms, such linear programming and quadratic programming [LPs
> and QPs].)
> 
> Steven

I would suggest making your NLopt functions (and backend) available, as 
they currently are, in the optimization package.  Then when someone 
installs the optim package, all of NLopt would also be available.  This 
would require you copying over the code to the octave-forge svn file 
tree and adapting whatever install process NLopt currently uses to the 
octave-forge installation process.

Jonathan

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