[Pkg-octave-devel] mkoctfile not installed in Wheezy

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2012-12-01 19:45]:
>
> Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> writes:
>>
>> In the thread in help-octave, Juan Pablo pointed out that the command 
>> "mkoctfile" fails when liboctave-dev is not installed.  I think that 
>> /usr/share/octave/<version>/m/miscellaneous/mkoctfile.m should be moved from 
>> octave-common into liboctave-dev, at least for now.
>
> Or maybe better, we could patch it so that it tells to install 
> liboctave-dev if /usr/bin/mkoctfile is not found. What do you think?

Yes, this is a possible solution.  The drawback is the maintenance 
burden, since we will have to keep in sync with upstream.  Also, notice 
that if we only patch the code, the command "help mkoctfile" will give 
misleading information, making the user believe that the function is 
available in the system.

Another (much more tortuous) solution would be to create a placeholder 
mkoctifle.m in octave-common and make liboctave-dev dpkg-divert it to the 
real one.

Rafael