[Pkg-octave-devel] Adding an Octave-dependent software into Debian

[Sébastien Villemot]

"Rafael Laboissiere" <rafael at debian.org> a écrit :

> * Sébastien Villemot <sebastien.villemot at ens.fr> [2009-02-23 11:44]:
>
>> Basically Dynare consists of three parts:
>> - a preprocessor (written in C++) which parses a text file containing
>> the model description, and dumps Octave/Matlab intermediary files
>> - a collection of Octave/Matlab routines
>> - a few dynamically loadable libraries (DLL), called from
>> Octave/Matlab, for time-critical algorithms
>>
>> Historically Dynare has been developed and used under Matlab. With a
>> few minor changes we made it run under GNU Octave 3.0 (although a few
>> features are still problematic).
>>
>> I would like to make Dynare enter the official Debian project. I have
>> already created a Debian package for the latest stable version of
>> Dynare (see http://www.dynare.org/DynareWiki/InstallOnDebianOrUbuntu).
>> However note that my packaging is probably not suitable for direct
>> entry into Debian, because it creates both Octave and Matlab DLLs, the
>> latter being obviously not desirable for a Debian package.
>>
>> I have ideas on how to improve the packaging, and of course I would be
>> willing to do the necessary work for creating a 100% policy-compliant
>> package.
>>
>> Do you think that I should open a RFP bug? Do you know of anyone who
>> would be willing to become a sponsor for this?
>
> Since Dynare is so tightly related to Octave, you could join the DOG (Debian
> Octave Group) and add your initial packaging work to our SVN repository.
> that way, we could work in a collaborative way towards integrating Dynare
> into Debian.
>
> At any rate, a ITP bug should be filled for the package.

Thanks for your answer.

This sounds good, I would be glad to join the DOG. I'm going to read  
the development guidelines and other related material.

One question by the way:

As I told you, my current packaging builds MEX files for Matlab. This  
is not desirable nor feasible for an official Debian package, because  
of Matlab's license and also because autobuilding of the MEX files  
requires Matlab, which is not an option for Debian buildd.

However, since most current Dynare users run it under Matlab, I would  
like to provide a user-friendly procedure for them. Basically two  
things need to be done for Matlab users: remove some GCC 4.1 libraries  
shipped with Matlab (which create problems with Dynare C++  
preprocessor when it is compiled with GCC 4.3), and recompile the MEX  
files. This could be done either (1) through a debconf helper, or (2)  
by providing a dedicated script (for example in /usr/share/doc) to be  
run by the user.

Have you any objection to this?

Best,

Sébastien Villemot