[Pkg-octave-devel] Debian packagers want to know

[Philip Nienhuis]

Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> Philip Nienhuis<pr.nienhuis at hccnet.nl>  writes:
>
>> I see by following links from another recent post by you that you are about to
>> prepare an Octave io-1.0.17 pkg for Debian.
>
> We have just packaged io 1.0.17 for Debian (see [1]).
>
> This is the first Debian release for which spreadsheet support works out
> of the box.

Good, congratulations!

 >             For your information, I copy/paste below the README that I
> included in the package:
>
>
> This package provides support for reading Excel (XLS, XLSX) and OpenDocument
> (ODS) spreadsheet files from Octave.
>
> If you installed the packages recommended by octave-io, the following
> interfaces should already be functional:
>
>   * JExcelAPI (JXL): for reading XLS files

... and writing XLS
>
>   * LibreOffice (UNO): for reading ODS, XLS, XLSX, SXC files

.... & writing.
Plus:
.... + WK1, QP1, DBF, XLSM, CSV, etc, i.e. any file format supported by 
LibreOffice Calc!

> Note that the UNO interface is still experimental. It interacts with running
> LibreOffice processes.
>
> Other interfaces (Apache POI, OpenXLS, ODF Toolkit, JOpenDocument) are not
> available in Debian because they are either not yet packaged or non-free
> (e.g. the poi-ooxml JAR has been removed from libapache-poi-java package since
> it depends on non-DFSG-free software).

What non-DFSG-free SW? AFAICS it is released under Apache license, as is 
xbean (=taken from xmlbeans). Or is dom4j's BSD style license the culprit?

> You can still manually download and install the corresponding JARs in
> /usr/local/share/java, they should be autodetected. The chk_spreadsheet_support
> function can help you diagnose problems if any.
>
> More information on spreadsheet support can be found in READ-XLS.html and
> READ-ODS.html.
>
>
>> FYI: I plan to make a new io pkg release (v. 1.0.18) fairly soon; it fixes a
>> few bugs and updates to a minor but creepy LibreOffice UNO-Java API change
>> (that they didn't tell me about earlier ;-(  )
>
> Of course, we will package this upcoming release when it becomes
> available. If you want to have it in the next Debian release (Wheezy),
> this should be done before June.

In principle I got the release ready, but unexpected trouble came up now 
that it again contains compiled modules (inherited from the 
miscellaneous pkg).
So June doesn't look out of reach, does it :-)

Philip