[Pkg-octave-devel] Addressing some bug reports

[Thomas Weber]

Am Dienstag, den 15.04.2008, 12:42 +0200 schrieb Rafael Laboissiere:
> Some bug reports have been put on hold while we were busy with the
> suitesparse/hdf5 transition, the octave2.9 removal, and the octave-forge
> pkgs upload:
> 
>     #420079: octave3.0 needs mkoctfiles
>     #420080: Merge octave3.0 and octave3.0-headers packages

Merging the packages means pulling in every single -dev package we need
during build in end users installation, otherwise neither pkg.m nor
mkoctfile will work. This is *a lot* ...
On second look, maybe it's not that much (about 100MB), but I think we
are missing some -dev packages in octave3.0-headers (qhull-dev, ...).


In the long term, it would be worthwile to change mkoctfile to not link
self built .oct files with every library. I don't know if this is
actually feasible, but the current setup triggers difficult to find
bugs:
If you upgrade a library and the distribution upgrades your octave
installation, your self-built .oct files will stop working, with no
error message whatsoever:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/octave3.0/+bug/204717

We had the same problem in Debian, where I think the hdf5 transition was
the culprit (octave linked against the new hdf5 library, whereas octaviz
was still linked against the old one).


> #460812: octave-doc, octave-info, etc. should be actual packages
Same problem as with an octave package: which package should they point
to and who decides about a switch later (as happened from octave2.1 to
octave2.9)? I'm not against this in any way, but I see simply no good
solution to this.

	Thomas