[Pkg-octave-devel] Multi-archifying Octave

[Ben Abbott]

On Feb 28, 2012, at 4:13 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> 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.


Jordi,

I'm unfamiliar with what is being proposed for Debian.

MacOS already has a "universal" option to allow libraries and binaries to be built which support more than one architecture. Is Debian planning something similar, or do they plan to build different libs and place them in different paths ?

Ben