We have been using Julia 1.0.* for a legacy project for quite some time. The program relies on the MultivariateStats package, which in turn uses Arpack v0.3.1. This version of Arpack relies on ArpackBuilder, or rather, relied on it until recently, when the entire project was removed from GitHub. Perhaps it has just been made private, but the result is the same: it is inaccessible. This in turn means that our project doesn’t build any more, because it cannot download a dependency. Apparently, upgrading the dependencies is not an option, because there are no newer versions of these packages which are compatible with Julia v1.0.*.
So I’m asking mainly the maintainers of JuliaLinearAlgebra, e.g., @viralbshah, if the removal of the ArpackBuilder repository was intentional? Couldn’t it have been archived instead of being entirely removed? Is there another way to make this project build again without having to upgrade to Julia 1.3+?
Arpack was updated 3 years ago to move from BinaryProvider to Arpack_jll provided by BinaryBuilder, which is a much more robust system. I don’t know whether 1.3 was LTS at that time, but either around that time or shortly after, 1.0 was no longer supported, so I don’t think BinaryProvider should be expected to work.
Before that happened though, there was a v0.3.2 tagged that contains the exact same code (using the legacy BinaryProvider), but provided by the newly built Arpack_jll for backwards compatibility. I’d recommend updating the dependencies of your legacy project to use v0.3.2 instead of v0.3.1, which (by semantic versioning) is compatible and still works.
MultivariateStats shouldn’t care, as it claims compatibility with Arpack @ 0.3-0.5.
FWIW, the internet archive did capture an old version of the ArpackBuilder repo: GitHub - JuliaLinearAlgebra/ArpackBuilder (maybe I spoke to soon, looking at some of the files doesn’t work…)
It’s hard to know for sure, our last successful build was on Sep 29, so the ArpackBuilder repository must have still been in place at that time. By Oct 30, it was already gone. The last version that appears in Google’s cache is from Aug 13.
A bunch of repositories were indeed deleted, probably with the assumption they were deprecated and unused. I have sent a support ticket to Github asking for them to be restored.
Apologies, I am the one responsible for this. Will be careful about how I deprecate these in the future - I had forgotten in the new BB world how we used to do things back in the day! @fredrikekre Thanks for emailing github.
