[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#665326: confused by disapparance of octave-depends (nothing in changelog)

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien.villemot at ens.fr> [2012-03-23 10:32]:

> Yaroslav Halchenko <debian at onerussian.com> writes:
> 
> > I had build-depends on octave-pkg-dev (which depended on octave3.2-headers) and
> > used octave-depends to substitute octave:Depends .  Now the package FTBFS in
> > sid and it is not transparent where octave-depends are gone/what they are
> > replaced with...
> >
> > I see
> >  Nothing in changelog
> >  commit msgs for its removal (from debian/ or debian/in) were as non-descriptive.
> >
> > As I understand -- now octave-depends is no longer needed and we could
> > simply depend on octave (although for me due to backporting I would need to
> > maintain both ways).  
> 
> I may have missed something, but I don't know what "octave-depends" is.
> 
> The substitution of ${octave:Depends} in debian/control is done by the
> script installed in /usr/share/octave/debian/dh/octave-pkg-helper.
> 
> This script has not been renamed or removed in recent versions of
> octave-pkg-dev, so I don't really understand your problem.

Let us revisit this issue.  I am considering to reintroduce the
octave-depends script into the liboctave-dev package.  This script was
formerly shipped with the octaveX.Y-headers package and was a handy way
of substituting ${octave:Depends} in debian/control, such that both the
package name and version appeared in the final relationship, something
like this:

    Depends: octave3.2 (>= 3.2.4)

We abandoned versioned package names, but an octave-depends script could
still be useful nowadays to get:

    Depends: ${octave:Depends}
    
replaced by:

    Depends: octave (>= 3.6.1)

so that the version of Octave in the relationship will match the one used
when the package was built.  There are some packages in Debian that use
octave-depends, like xmds and libgdf, and it would be a courtesy of ours
to not break their debian/rules.

There is some confusion around this issue because the same tag
${octave:Depends} is used by octave-pkg-dev in the building of the
Octave-Forge packages.  Unfortunately, this happened for historical
reasons, not by design.

What you think about reintroducing the octave-depends script?

Rafael