[Pkg-octave-devel] Proposal: nuke most of the Octave packaging

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

As I was working again today on updating to Octave 3.4, I found very
little to salvage in Rafael's packaging. Most of the work seems to be
on

    1) A complicated and pervasive system for building in parallel
       different versions of Octave,

    2) Maintaining own set of patches,

    3) Maintaining outdated documentation,

None of these two relevant anymore. (1) was put in place at a time
when Octave itself followed a stable-testing-unstable release cycle,
but now only makes stable releases. (2) is also less relevant because
Octave now has a larger community and infrasture in order to accept
patches. I think only one or two patch in debian/patches that is still
relevant and I can't apply upstream to Octave. (3) goes without saying.

In addition to this, there's a lot of work that simply isn't
applicable anymore (e.g. Octave's Emacs files which 3.4 doesn't ship
anymore, the postinst and prerm maintainer scripts for multiple Octave
versions).

I find it easier to nuke most of the Debian packaging, start with a
simple one-liner debian/rules, and add stuff to it as seems necessary
(e.g. the MIPS bug #570771). Thomas, since you said you were working
on this and you've done most of the recent DOG packaging, let me ask
you again if you have anything done here, and if you think nuking most
of the current packaging is a bad idea.

Thanks,
- Jordi G. H.