[Pkg-octave-devel] Versioning the dependency on octave for the OF packages

Sébastien Villemot sebastien.villemot at ens.fr
Fri Mar 9 20:32:58 UTC 2012


Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> writes:

> * Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> [2012-03-09 18:18]:
>
>> I am just wondering whether we should add a version number to the
>> substitution of ${octave:Depends} that is done by octave-pkg-helper.
>> Right now, we are getting "Depends: octave".  Don't we want something
>> like "Depends: octave (>= 3.6.0)"?
>
> Ok, I just pushed the commit bed89f7e with a change to octave-pkg-helper
> that add a versioned dependency to octave.  It takes the version of
> /usr/bin/octave currently installed in the system.  I think that this is
> appropriate, since installing octave-pkg-dev will result in the correct
> version of octave being pulled.
>
> The reason I think this is necessary is because a unversioned dependency
> on octave will cause problems because the pre-3.6 octave package would
> satisfy the dependency.  Of course this would not be a problem with OF
> packages arch:any, since they depend on liboctave1.
>
> Tell me if you agree with this, please.

It looks good to me.

Note that currently this improvement is not really needed since there is
no pre-3.6 octave package in Debian (the 3.2 package has a different
name: octave3.2), but for the future it is a useful mechanism.

In some cases it will probably create too tight dependencies, but on
average it is better to have too tight than too loose dependencies.

Also, for future improvements to octave-pkg-dev, we may want to exploit
the dependency versioning that is in the DESCRIPTION file of Forge
packages. Ideally octave-pkg-dev should fail if the installed octave is
lower than the required one. For instance, such a mechanism would have
prevented #649395; see also #661123 for a similar problem, but in that
case upstream also forgot to tighten the dependency.

It would also be useful to exploit the dependency versioning between
Forge packages, for similar reasons.

If you are willing to do that, please go ahead.

-- 
Sébastien Villemot
Researcher in Economics & Debian Maintainer
http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
Phone: +33-1-40-77-84-04 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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