Bug#327027: [Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#327027: octave2.1: not installable in sid

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Sep-2005, Laurent Bonnaud wrote:

| > Is libstdc++ also completely compatible?  Have there been absolutely
| > no changes that could affect layout of class members?
| 
| This question is no longer a concern since my tests have shown that g++
| 3.4 is worse than g++ 4.0.

But unless we are absolutely sure that everything is compatible from
one release to another, it does matter.

Suppose the Octave package is compiled with 4.0 (for example) and the
dependencies are set for g++ >= 4.0 then later someone installs 4.1.
Then if there are incompatibilities (a change in the layout of some
data members in a standard class, for example) then there can be
problems when an Octave user builds a dynamically linked function
using mkoctfile, because mkoctfile is only asking for g++ and the
user gets g++-4.1, not g++-4.0

In the old days, the I think Octave was configured with something like

  CC=gcc-4.0 CXX=g++-4.0 F77=g77-4.0

so that these names would be put into the mkoctfile script.  That way,
when someone later ran mkoctfile, they would be sure to get the same
version of the compiler that was used to build the Octave binary they
were using.

Yes, I would prefer to not have to fix the compiler versions, but
unless we know that they are compatible, I see no other option.

jwe