Exact linear programming solver. This is a fork of QSopt_ex, originally released by Daniel Espinoza et al. version 2.5.10 under the GPL 3 (or later). The authors of QSopt_ex also granted a free license to use the software for research purposes but this license does not extend to the changes introduced by this project.

The goal of this fork is to update the software, and in particular the build system, to be more friendly. In addition the external dependencies have been reduced by removing the dependency on EGlib, GNU awk and Exuberant Ctags.

• C compiler: Tested with GCC and Clang.
• Libtool: To build QSopt_ex as a library.
• GNU MP: Tested with 6.0.0. The original authors stated that QSopt_ex was tested with the 4.x.x and with 5.0.x version series. The authors also noted that GNU MP should be compiled using option --enable-alloca=malloc-reentrant but this does not seem to be required anymore.
• libz: To read/write gz-compresed files.
• libbz2 To read/write bz2-compresed files.

If you have just cloned the source code with Git, run the bootstrap script to automatically set up the build system.

$ ./bootstrap

This script calls autoreconf and libtoolize with the proper arguments. This will also regenerate the configure script. It is recommended to build out of source directory. This is simply done by running configure from an empty directory.

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ ../configure

Use ./configure --help to see available options. Now the test programs and library can be compiled using make. It is possible to do a parallel build using the -jX switch where X is the number of parallel processes.

$ make -j4

To install the libraries and executables run

$ make install

This will install into the prefix specified when configure was run.

The exact solver is available though the esolver executable. It can be invoked to solve an LP or MPS format problem.

$ ./esolver cycle.mps

See ./esolver -h for more information on command line options.

To see an example of how to use this software as a C library, see the test tests/test_qs.c or the program esolver/esolver.c.

The Python module has moved to a separate repository at jonls/python-qsoptex.