[Pkg-octave-devel] Dangling alternatives symlink on the autobuilders

[Rafael Laboissiere]

We (the Debian Octave Group, pkg-octave.alioth.d.o) are running into a
nasty problem regarding the Debian autobuilders.  For some reason, one of
the previous uploads of the octave2.9 package has wrongly manipulated the
octave-config alternative and have let it in the manual status pointing
to an non-existent file (/usr/bin/octave-config-2.1.71).

This means that every package build-depending on octave2.1 does not have
the correct alternative installed and fails to build on the autobuilders
(or, even worse, builds incorrectly and enters testing, see Bug#349139).

To help diagnosing the problem, I added a "upadate-alternative --display"
command to the debian/rules file of the octaviz package.  The result can be
seen here, for instance:

http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?&pkg=octaviz&ver=0.4.0-21&arch=ia64&file=log

An excerpt of the log above:

###########################################################################
Selecting previously deselected package octave2.1-headers.
Unpacking octave2.1-headers (from .../octave2.1-headers_1%3a2.1.72-8_ia64.deb) ...
[...]
Setting up octave2.1-headers (2.1.72-8) ...
[...]
/usr/sbin/update-alternatives --display octave-config
octave-config - status is manual.
link currently points to /usr/bin/octave-config-2.1.71
/usr/bin/octave-config-2.1.72 - priority 80
slave octave-config.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/octave-config-2.1.72.1.gz
Current `best' version is /usr/bin/octave-config-2.1.72.
###########################################################################

How can this problem be fixed?

-- 
Rafael Laboissiere