[Pkg-octave-devel] Multi-archifying Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

CC'ing the Octave dev list, brief context: future Debian is going
multiarch and is wondering what to do about the arch-specific names in
Octave's oct-file paths.

On 28 February 2012 15:31, Thomas Weber <tweber at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 08:14:41PM -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>> On 27 February 2012 18:08, Thomas Weber <tweber at debian.org> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 09:37:26PM +0100, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
>> >>  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/octave/3.6.1/oct/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/svd.oct
>> >>  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/octave/packages/3.6.1/optim-1.0.17/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-api-v48+/
>> >>
>> >> Note that there are two triplets in the paths.
>> >>
>> >> Functionally this is not a problem, but it is a little ugly, since there
>> >> is some sort of duplication.
>> >
>> > I'm not sure about the "no problem part".
>> > On i386, the paths will loke like
>> > /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/.../i486-pc-linux-gnu
>> > so the numbers are different.
>> >
>> > So, will this work with multi-arch?
>>
>> Should we give Octave a configure-time option to not use arches in
>> directory names? We could do that for future releases.
>
> Maybe instead of an option, just remove the arch parts.
> I don't know what purpose they solve other than adding one more
> directory to Octave's path. It's not like an ARM Octave binary can load
> .oct files from an i386 build.

I believe it's an effort to emulate the .mex64, .mexglx, and .mexglx64
filename extensions of Matlab, the point being that you can have
several oct files in a network drive or something and have several
terminals mount that network drive and using oct files without all
needing to be the same architecture.

So the same reason that Debian is going multiarch, I suppose. But if
Debian is already doing the multi-arching, I don't see a reason why
Octave should do it too, so it makes sense to disable the
multi-arching if the OS is already going to do it.

- Jordi G. H.