[Pkg-octave-devel] Matlab-Octave compatibility issue in future-Debian package

Michael Hanke michael.hanke at gmail.com
Mon Mar 20 21:20:19 UTC 2006


Hi,

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 11:19:54AM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 20-Mar-2006, Michael Hanke wrote:
> 
> | Hi,
> | 
> | [ Please keep me CC'ed as I'm not subscribed to the list. ]
> | 
> | I'm the maintainer of a to-become-official Debian package of FSL. This
> | is one of the major fMRI data analysis tools. See the following links
> | for more information (first is upstream homepage, second is package
> | homepage):
> | 
> | http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/
> | http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/fsl
> | 
> | 
> | The FSL sources contain some matlab functions for data import and export. 
> | But as Debian is about free software I wanted to check whether those
> | function work with Octave as well. 
> | 
> | As it turns out, they do except for two calls to eval() in 'read_avw.m'.
> | Those calls shall run a script that uses some FSL tools to convert a
> | dataset into the required format. As it seems, Octave doesn't like that
> | very much. But, if I change eval() to system() everything works fine.
> | 
> | I'm not familiar with Matlab (as I mostly use R). So my question is: Do
> | you know a way to patch those function, that the resulting code works
> | with Octave *and* Matlab? Is system() available in Matlab too? Are system()
> | and eval() equivalent for this purpose?
> | 
> | I have to support Matlab, because most people that use FSL will most
> | likely have Matlab installed. On the other side, I want to encourage
> | people to use free software alternatives. As I see it, the only way to
> | do this, is to make things easy (at least for idealistic scientists).
> | 
> | I attached the whole matlab stuff.
> 
> Octave and Matlab both have system and eval functions.  But I was
> unaware that eval in Matlab could be used to run shell commands.  Are
> you sure that is correct in the Matlab code you have?
Trying around with matlab I wasn't able to use eval to run shell
command. I patched those functions to use system() instead and reported
that to upstream.


Thanks.

Michael

  

-- 
GPG key:  1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke
ICQ: 48230050
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