[Pkg-octave-devel] Re: update-alternatives and Octave packages

[Colin Ingram]

sorry for the noise in your mailbox dirk

On 2/10/06, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 10 February 2006 at 03:22, Colin Ingram wrote:
> | this is exactly what i was thinking and this is what I did. proof of
> | concept, complete patch forthcoming. you'll obviously want to test for
> | the existence of octave-headers files.
>
> Or maybe this is reason enough to kill octave2.$X-headers and to merge it back
> into the main octave2$X package?  Would make life easier...
>

I think that the changes need to only be made in the octave2.X-headers
package postinst.  Since the headers depend on the octave2.1 package
you know those binaries will always be available.

Octave2.X could have

    update-alternatives  --install /usr/bin/octave octave \
                                 /usr/bin/octave-$VERSION $PRIORITY \
                        --slave /usr/share/man/man1/octave.1.gz octave.1.gz \
                                /usr/share/man/man1/octave-$VERSION.1.gz \
                        --slave /usr/bin/octave-bug octave-bug \
                                /usr/share/man/man1/octave-bug-$VERSION

and Octave2.1-Headers could have

    update-alternatives  --install /usr/bin/octave octave \
                                 /usr/bin/octave-$VERSION $PRIORITY \
                        --slave /usr/share/man/man1/octave.1.gz octave.1.gz \
                                /usr/share/man/man1/octave-$VERSION.1.gz \
                        --slave /usr/bin/octave-bug octave-bug \
                                /usr/share/man/man1/octave-bug-$VERSION \
                        --slave /usr/bin/octave-config octave-config	\
				/usr/bin/octave-config-$VERSION
                        --slave /usr/bin/mkoctfile mkoctfile	\
				/usr/bin/mkoctfile-$VERSION

etc.

on second thought this would work well if we only needed to consider
the two packages but since there are more an external script which
test for the existence of various binaries is probably needed.  In
that cause merging headers into main won't help much anyway.