ITP: fftw-3.0.1

["James R. Phillips" <antiskid56-cygwin at yahoo dot com>]

Hi all,

Discussion on maintainers@octave.org indicates octave performance on cygwin can
be improved by linking with the fftw library, which is a state-of-the-art
package for fast fourier transforms.  Accordingly, I am proposing cygwin
packaging for fftw-3.0.1, which is the current version.

Setup.hint would look like:
=====================
@ fftw3
sdesc: "Library for computing Fast Fourier Transforms"
ldesc: "fftw3 computes Fast Fourier Transforms in one or more dimensions.
It is extremely fast.  This package contains shared libraries for
double precision."
category: Math Libs
requires: cygwin
=====================

Although fftw3 can be built with both single and double precision versions,
octave only uses double precision, so that is all I propose to build.  Only a
shared library (dll) will be built; no static library will be provided.  I have
verified that octave can properly detect the presence of fftw during its
configuration, and can link with the shared library.

Although it would be possible to provide headers and documentation in a
separate package from the library, I do not propose to do so, preferring to
stay with the simplicity of a single binary package built from a single source
package for now.

Assuming the proposal is successful and the packaging is accepted, a new
version of octave, linked to the fftw library, would be released.  The octave
setup.hint would be modified to require fftw.

Comments welcomed.

Jim Phillips