D.13.3 Additional minpack notes

The lm* functions are better suited to problems in which the system function f has more outputs than inputs, and the hybr* functions are better suited to the alternative. If either is called when the other is more appropriate, the job is handed off to the other automatically.

The lmstr function is more memory efficient than the others because it doesn’t compute the whole Jacobian matrix at once. Any of the lm* functions is more memory efficient than the kinsol equivalent when the output list is sufficiently longer than the input list.

Unlike kinsol, there is no provision in minpack for constrained optimization.

The minpack documentation doesn’t state whether it’s re-entrant, but the odds are against it unless it uses no storage outside the user provided work areas. If it isn’t re-entrant, anomalous effects could occur when a virtual code function being optimized calls another minpack function. A workaround would be to use an equivalent kinsol function, which is re-entrant by design.

The avram configuration script searches for a C header file ‘minpack.h’ on the host system in order to build an interface to this library. This file is specific to the Debian minpack-dev package and is not part of the upstream Fortran source. Configuring avram with an interface to the minpack library on a non-Debian system may require the administrator to retrieve the header file manually from the Debian archive and place it under ‘/usr/include’ before running the configuration script (in addition to installing the minpack library itself, of course).

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