[Pkg-octave-devel] octave2.1 and octave2.9 in unstable

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Colin Ingram <synergizedmusic at gmail.com> [2005-11-14 20:17]:

> Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
>
> > The octave2.9 package has a RC bug (#310226, severity: serious) filed
> > against it.  I am afraid the package will not stay very long in
> > unstable due to the severity level of the said bug.  One possible
> > solution is to downgrade its level to "important".  Another solution
> > is to disable, if possible, the use of the glpk library at build
> > time.  At any rate, I already sent a patch to the maintainer of glpk
> > to allow building shared libraries for glpk
> > (http://bugs.debian.org/335237).  There has been no much progress on
> > this front, though.  Please, comments are welcome.
>
> Im not sure what the effects of disabling the glpk library...but if it 
> is something user can live with temporarily that might be the best 
> choice.  Especially considering the uncertainties in the package at
> this time(in Debian and upstream).

What is irritating is that changing the upstream sources to produce
shared libraries is completely trivial.  See the two patches that I
attached to Bug#335237:

upstream:
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi/glpk-libtool-upstream.patch?bug=335237;msg=5;att=1
debian:
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi/glpk-libtool-debian.patch?bug=335237;msg=5;att=2

Only five lines must be changed upstream and two in debian/rules.

I already considered forking the package and producing a version of glpk
exclusively for Octave in Debian.  The problem with this solution is that
we will have the burden of synchronizing with the upstream sources and
maintaining the SOVERSION number (this may be a painful task when one is
not involved in the upstream development).

-- 
Rafael