[Pkg-octave-devel] Dynare: git, matlab, testsuite

[Sébastien Villemot]

Hi everyone,

First, I'm glad to see that Dynare has now entered unstable. Thanks  
for your help in making this possible.

I'd like to discuss a few points for the future developments:

1) Should the dynare/debian repository be migrated to git? I'm not  
familiar with git, so I don't feel a strong urge to migrate. But if  
you definitely consider it as a goal, I will take the necessary steps.

2) My next immediate objective would be to facilitate things for  
Matlab users (which currently consist a large part of our user base,  
even though we are advocating the use of Octave, in particular for  
academics and students).

Note that the package which is actually in unstable works under  
Matlab: even though some parts of Dynare are implementd in MEX files,  
we provide alternative M-files which implement the same  
functionnality. So without MEX files, Dynare runs, but is slower.

The goal is therefore to provide compiled MEX files for Matlab. We  
obviously can't ship the binaries with Debian. So my idea is to create  
a dynare-matlab package (depending on the main dynare package), which  
would:
* install the MEX sources in /usr/src/dynare
* ask the user the location of Matlab on his drive, via debconf
* compile and install the MEX files in the postinst script
* delete the MEX files in the postrm script

I suppose that this dynare-matlab package would have to go into contrib.

Do you have any suggestion/objection to this?

3) Concerning the testsuite, and to answer Thomas' question, some of  
the very long tests are useless in the sense that we could test the  
same functionnality with shorter tests. We have to work a little bit  
on that upstream. But incorporating a testsuite in the Dynare Debian  
package definitely remains my objective, which could be reached quite  
soon.

All the best,

-- 
Sébastien Villemot