[Pkg-octave-devel] Octave 2.9.10, octave-forge with new pkg system: Call for volunteers

[Rafael Laboissiere]

I hope to finish soon the packaging of Octave 2.9.10 for Debian.  This is
taking time because, first, the package takes very long to build on the
machine where I have a sid chroot and, second, many changes to the Debian
files were needed.

The octave2.9*_2.9.10-1 packages will be uploaded to experimental because
octave2.9 build-depends on libglpk-dev >= 4.15, which is still waiting for
approval in the NEW queue.  The new GLPK packages can be accessed through my
personal apt-getable repository [1].

A new version of octave-forge has been released yesterday that uses the new
Octave package manager.  This means that Debian users will be able to
install the octave-forge packages without using Debian's octave2.9-forge.
Therefore, we should restructure the Debian packaging system for
octave-forge, perhaps along the same lines as in cran2deb [2].

This is a quite big project and I cannot commit myself in undertaking it
soon.  It would be great if people could step forward and help us to
accomplish this task.  I have not yet a clear idea on how we should proceed,
so it would be good to discuss about the alternatives here in
pkg-octave-devel.

[1] http://people.debian.org/~rafael/glpk/
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/?AliothPkgBioc

-- 
Rafael