[Pkg-octave-devel] liboctave-dev insists on serial version of the hdf5 library

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien.villemot at ens.fr> [2012-08-12 10:22]:

> Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> writes:
> 
> > As you mentioned before, this change is worth going into wheezy.  For
> > that, we should fill a RC bug report on the issue.  If nobody objects, I
> > will do it soon.
> 
> I am not sure this is a RC issue. But since it is a regression from
> Squeeze and that the change is very small and harmless, I guess there
> are good chances that it will be accepted by the Release Team.

RC or not, below is a draft of the bug report that could be filed about
the issue.  Please, tell me what you think.
 
Rafael

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To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit at bugs.debian.org>
Subject: liboctave-dev: Allow co-installation with any version of the HDF5 library

Package: liboctave-dev
Version: 3.6.2-4
Severity: serious
Justification: makes unrelated software on the system uninstallable

The liboctave-dev package depends on the libhdf5-dev package which, on
its turn, depends on the serial version of the HDF5 library package
(libhdf5-7).  This version of the HDF5 library conflicts with the
parallel versions (libhdf5-openmpi-7 and libhdf5-mpich2-7). That means
that liboctave-dev is not co-installable with the parallel versions of
the HDF5 library.

We have a long history of complaints about this issue (for a recent case,
see [1]).  For instance, packages like gmsh and libhdf5-openmpi-dev, 
quite well placed in the Debian Popularity Contest BTW (542 and 277
installations), cannot be co-installed with liboctave-dev.  Notice that
gmsh is not in wheezy, due to licensing issues, but it is still in sid.

Furthermore, earlier this year, we (the Debian Octave Groupe) had to
require the removal of the octave-msh [2] and octave-bim [3] packages,
because they could not be built from source, since they build-depend on
libhdf5-openmpi-7.  If the present bug report is fixed, then we will be
able to introduced those packages in Debian again.

Rafael Laboissière

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/2012-August/009582.html
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=665858
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=665860

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