[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#686926: liboctave-dev: creates broken .oct files when the OpenMPI flavor of HDF5 (libhdf5-openmpi-dev) is installed

[Sébastien Villemot]

Package: liboctave-dev
Version: 3.6.2-5
Severity: important

When libhdf5-openmpi-dev is co-installed with liboctave-dev, the .oct files
produced by mkoctfile trigger the following error when run from Octave:

 error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/octave/packages/optim-1.2.0/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-api-v48+/numgradient.oct: failed to load: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/octave/packages/optim-1.2.0/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-api-v48+/numgradient.oct: undefined symbol: _ZN3MPI8Datatype4FreeEv

The missing symbol is defined in /usr/lib/libmpi_cxx.so. As a consequence, a
workaround for the bug is to run Octave with this library preloaded:

 $ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libmpi_cxx.so octave

Note that this problem is only present with libhdf5-openmpi-dev: it is not
present with libhdf5-dev (serial version, the default) or libhdf5-mpich2-dev.