[Pkg-octave-devel] Octave 2.9.10, octave-forge with new pkg system: Call for volunteers

[Rafael Laboissiere]

Hi Thomas,

First of all, thanks for your encouraging remarks :-)

* Thomas Weber <thomas.weber.mail at gmail.com> [2007-03-29 12:36]:

> I had a cursory look at pkg.m. I don't think we will come too far
> without patching it (it uses the share/ directory structure hard-coded;
> or maybe I overlooked something).

In Octave 2.9.10, I see a persistent global_list variable in pkg.m that can
be set by the user.  At any rate, my look at it has probably been even more
cursory than yours.

> Urgs, cran2deb.pl has > 1600 lines. I seriously hope we can find
> something simpler, otherwise this will be a maintenance nightmare. 

<random thoughts on>

Add to that the > 650 lines of CRAN2DEB.pm.  I am almost sure we could come
up with something simpler or at least less monolithic (dh-make comes to
mind).  I recently packaged ttf2tex for Debian and included in the package a
helper script (ttf2tex-mkpkg) to create a LaTeX font package from a
collection of TrueType font files.  The debian/* files are generated from
templates and the script itself is quite short.  I hope we could do
something simple for Octave pkg.

Another example that I remember now is dh-make-perl.  We could take some
inspiration from that.  There is also kernel-pacakge, but I do not think we
would like to look at it.

The design of octave-mkpkg (or whichever name it will have) will depend on
its intended use, which could be:

1) Like cran2deb.pl, generate a full apt-get repository of all packages
   available at octave-forge.

2) A helper tool for the DOG to generate and update official Debian packages
   for each package available at octave-forge.

3) A simple tool for the users to create a Debian package from a given
   octave-forge pkg.

My preference is option 2 (which, actually, includes option 3).  In this
case, the tricky part would be upgrading the package.

<random thoughts off>

-- 
Rafael