Re: Porting Control Systems Toolbox from Octave to R

[Lukas Reichlin]

Hi Jason

The main author of the control package passed away [1].

FYI: I'm currently working on a new, object-oriented control package for Octave 
called control-oo [2]. You can download the package from this link [3]. Luca 
Favatella (the maintainer of "control") and I intend to make control-oo the 
"official" control package once the fix for an Octave bug [4] is included in an 
upcoming release.
We think this step would offer substantially better compatibility to Matlab's 
control systems toolbox for the average user. It would fix some long-standing 
bugs as well ...  
Probably there won't be any enhancements to the "old" control package in the 
future. (At least I don't know any contributors interested in doing this at the 
moment) This could be a viewed as a pro (stable codebase for your port) and con 
("outdatedness", some bugs).

Regards,
Lukas Reichlin

[1]
http://eng.auburn.edu/programs/ece/staff/hodel-memorial.html

[2]
http://octave.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/octave/trunk/octave-forge/extra/control-oo/

[3]
http://octave.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/octave/trunk/octave-forge/extra/control-oo.tar.gz?view=tar

[4]
http://www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/bug-octave/2009-December/009928.html




> To Whom It May Concern,
> 
> I've primarily been working with the R Project for Statistical Computing 
> (http://www.r-project.org/), which I guess is a sister OpenSource 
> mathematical project.  
> 
> I've really enjoyed working with the R Language, but I've also really enjoyed 
> working with the Control Systems Toolbox within Octave.  Thus, I would like 
> to investigate the possibility of porting the Control System Toolbox (CST) 
> from Octave to R.  
> 
> After reviewing the Copyright information within the CST package it appears 
> to be GPL 2, so I believe porting should be okay.  
> 
> I guess I wanted to coordinate with any of the the primary stakeholders in 
> the CST to check on a few items:
> (a) is there any interest to help with the port from Octave to R, 
> (b) has any effort already started in the area of porting it from Octave to 
> R, and
> (c) are there any primary concerns about porting the capability from Octave 
> to R.
> 
> I've
> been in communication with a gentleman who ported some of the signal
> capability from Octave to R, so I'm hoping to leverage some of his
> lessons learned.  Also, I'm not sure the initial versions of the port
> will be able to include all the functionality of the package, but I
> hope at a minimum the initial release will include the bode function
> for simple 2nd order systems.  
> 
> Again, I really appreciate all
> the effort you put into producing the CST and Octave, so I would want to 
> assure
> credit is still given to the developers of CST as the initial and primary 
> developers of
> the R CST and my involvement was simply to port it to R.  I would also
> want to assure that the quality of the results are also maintained, so
> I would plan to do some check outs and regression tests.  
> 
> Any feedback from you on these topics is greatly appreciated.    
> 
> Sincerely, 
> Jason Rupert
> 
> address@hidden
> 
> P.S. I attempted to send a direct email to the email addresses listed in the 
> CST documentation, but the majority of those email accounts bounced.  I 
> figured that it would be good protocol to post these thoughts to the Octave 
> forum prior to proceeding, so thank you for entertaining these topics.  
> 
> 
> 
> 
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