[Pkg-octave-devel] Multi-archifying Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Feb-2012, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| the point being that you can have
| several oct files in a network drive or something and have several
| terminals mount that network drive and using oct files without all
| needing to be the same architecture.

Yes, back in the olden times when disk space was expensive this sort
of arrangement was common with heterogeneous networks of Unix
workstations.  So the idea was to allow a single installation of
Octave to work on multiple architectures while sharing all the
architecture independent files.

What is the motivation for doing this now in Debian?

Can you achieve what you need without having a special option?  Is it
sufficient to explicitly set the values for the following variables?

  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(archlibdir,
    '$(libexecdir)/octave/$(version)/exec/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(localarchlibdir,
    '$(libexecdir)/octave/site/exec/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(localapiarchlibdir,
    '$(libexecdir)/octave/$(api_version)/site/exec/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(localverarchlibdir,
    '$(libexecdir)/octave/$(version)/site/exec/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(octfiledir,
    '$(libdir)/octave/$(version)/oct/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(localoctfiledir,
    '$(libdir)/octave/site/oct/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(localapioctfiledir,
    '$(libdir)/octave/site/oct/$(api_version)/$(canonical_host_type)')
  OCTAVE_SET_DEFAULT(localveroctfiledir,
    '$(libdir)/octave/$(version)/site/oct/$(canonical_host_type)')

It seems to me that something like

  configure \
    archlibdir='$(libexecdir)/octave/$(version)/exec' \
    localarchlibdir='$(libexecdir)/octave/site/exec' \
    ...

should work.

jwe