[Pkg-octave-devel] State of the Union 2008-03

Sun Mar 1 13:28:55 UTC 2009

0. Genesis
==========

Sorry for providing this "State of the Union" address quite late, my
original plan was to do it in the very beginning of 2009.  These last two
months have been quite exciting in Debian, due to the release of lenny on
Valentine's Day.  Also, upstream activity has been quite intensive lately.
We are now close to have a final 3.0.4 release and we just got a new
3.1.53 unstable snapshot release.

1. Removal of octave2.1
=======================

Thomas Weber has started [1] the work for getting rid of octave2.1 in
squeeze.  A couple of packages were blocking the removal :

* octave2.1-forge (already removed, see Bug#516106)
* octave-gpc (already removed, see #516111)
* inline-octave (already removed, see #516112)

These three packages are either obsolete or do not work with octave3.0. Note
that octave-gpc was in total infringement with the GPL.

* octaviz
* octplot

These two packages are kind of obsolete, but still work with octave3.0.  We
decided to put them in "feature freeze" state, unless upstream development
starts again.  This means that we will do minimal work on them and their
removal will be requested post-squeeze.

* h5utils

This is the last package left and we have already proposed a patch for
making it work with octave3.0 (see Bug#516453).  We are waiting for the
maintainer to react.  If this takes too long, I will consider NMUing a fixed
version to unstable and immediately after that we will request the removal
of octave2.1 from squeeze.

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/2009-February/005389.html

2. Release of 3.0.4
===================

Version 3.0.4~rc5-1 of ovtave3.0 is in experimental and most of the
autobuilders succeeded in building it (to this date, hppa failed [2] due to
do build-dep problems and mipsel failed [3] for some mysterious reason,
perhaps an ICE).  Note that this version includes a patch [4] that fixes an
egregious problem in plotting around the clf() function (see the thread [5]
in octave-maintainers for further details).

I am holding the upload to unstable off because of some library transitions :

* glpk
  This is not really a transition, but I was waiting for version 4.36-2 to
  reach testing, which should happen very soon [6].

* suitesparse
  This transition is under way [7].  Note that version 3.0.1 of octave3.0
  currently in unstable does not build against suitesparse-3.2.0.  On the
  other hand, the versions of octave3.0 and octave3.1 in experimental are
  okay.

* lapack
  The API of the Lapack library changed from version 3.1 to 3.2. However,
  this does not seem to affect the rdepend packages in Debian.  See my
  recent message to debian-release [9] for details.  At any rate, both
  octave3.0 and octave3.1 build and run correctly against
  liblapack-dev_3.2.0-1, currently in experimental.

[2] http://experimental.debian.net/fetch.php?&pkg=octave3.0&ver=1%3A3.0.4~rc5-1&arch=hppa&stamp=1235717575&file=log&as=raw
[3] http://experimental.debian.net/fetch.php?&pkg=octave3.0&ver=1%3A3.0.4~rc5-1&arch=mipsel&stamp=1235831304&file=log&as=raw
[4] http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-octave/octave/trunk/debian/patches/proper-delete-of-axes-in-clf.dpatch?rev=2697&view=markup
[5] http://www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2009-February/011053.html
[6] http://release.debian.org/migration/testing.pl?package=glpk
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2009/02/msg00411.html
[8] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
[9] http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2009/03/msg00013.html

3. Fixed conflicts between octave3.0 and octave3.1
==================================================

Some time ago, it was impossible to have both octave3.0 and octave3.1
installed together, due to some file conflicts.  I think this is fixed now
in experimental.  One of the important changes that I made regards the way
add-on packages are handled.  Up to know, both packages had a common way for
accessing the add-on pkgs, both for the database file
(/usr/share/octave/octave_packages) and the installation directory
(/usr/share/octave/packages/).

This si changed in experimental and the pkg directory is now versioned
(/usr/share/octave/packages/3.*/).  This means that if users of octave3.1
wish to use the octave-forge pkgs, then they will have to install the pkgs
by hand. This will avoid bug reports like Bug#516772.  Remember that the
octave3.1 package is kind of, huh, experimental :-)

4. Octave-Forge pkgs
====================

After octave3.0_3.0.4 will reach unstable, we will have to update our >30
octave-forge packages.  This will be a boring work, so I hope everybody will
participate in the effort.

Note that there will be more work than just changing the distribution label
to "unstable" in debian/changelog.  For instance, I started to make some
changes to the debian/copyright files according to the current (unofficial)
standard [10].  Also, I have put the development of octave-pkg-dev on hold
and there will be for sure some improvements to do in this package.  So, if
you are planing to work on the octave-forge pkgs, please coordinate the
efforts through pkg-octave-devel.

[10] http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat

5. Miscellaneous news
=====================

Sébastien Villemot has announced [11] his intention to package Dynare [12]
for Debian.  Dynare is a free software for the resolution and estimation of
a family of economic models called Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium
(DSGE) models. Sébastien is also an upstream developer of Dynare and is now
a member of the DOG.

Jordi Gutiérrez put together the qrupdate package, which will be an
improvement for octave3.1.  This package has been roting in the NEW queue
[13] for three weeks.  I guess that the ftp-master admins are still
recovering from the lenny release aftermath :-)

[11] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/2009-February/005461.html
[12] http://www.dynare.org
[13] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new/qrupdate_1.0-1.html

6. Manpower
===========

You know the drill.  The DOG always lack manpower.  Any help is highly
appreciated.  Thanks in advance for your participation!

7. Apocalypse
=============

Thanks for having read this document until its very last line (supposing
that you did not cheated and just scrolled down until here :-).

-- 
Rafael Laboissiere