[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#335451: marked as done (octave-forge uninstallable on testing)

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users.sf.net> [2005-11-02 22:05]:

> I may have asked this before, but couldn't octave-forge recommend 
> libginac rather than requiring it?
> 
> If it would help, I could rename symbols() to __symbols__() and write a 
> little wrapper symbols() which calls __symbols__() in a try-catch block 
> with a message reporting that ginac needs to be installed for symbols 
> to work.
> 
> Also, I believe the only dependency is libginac.  This depends on 
> libcln which in turn depends (optionally?) on libgmp.

Thanks for the suggestion, Paul, but I am afraid we cannot (and should
not) implement your proposal.  The reason is that the dependencies are
calculated automatically by dh_shlibdeps, which is a wrapper around
dpkg-shlibdeps. The dh_shlibdeps command checks every ELF executable and
shared library in the package for library dependencies. Since it finds
thinks like:

    $ ldd /usr/lib/octave/site/oct/api-v13/i486-pc-linux-gnu/octave-forge/symbols.oct | grep '\(ginac\|cln\|gmp\)'
        libginac-1.3.so.2 => /usr/lib/libginac-1.3.so.2 (0x400db000)
        libcln.so.3 => /usr/lib/libcln.so.3 (0x40314000)
        libgmp.so.3 => /usr/lib/libgmp.so.3 (0x4040d000)
			
the three dependencies are automatically included.

At any rate, nothing is broken with regard to the binary dependencies, so
there is nothing to fix here.  I think that the user reporting Bug#335451
had his system in an inconsistent state.

-- 
Rafael