[Pkg-octave-devel] [RFC] patch octave to help users install auxiliary packages

[Mike Miller]

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 15:04:12 -0400, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 3 August 2013 06:33, Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> wrote:
>> * Mike Miller <mtmiller at ieee.org> [2013-08-01 09:42]:
>>
>>> Hi, looking for comments on this unfinished idea. What do you think about
>>> carrying a patch for octave that would indicate which Debian packages users
>>> need to install when certain commands fail? I'm thinking specifically about
>>> doc and mkoctfile, are there others? Yes, users can read README.Debian, but
>>> we all know not everyone looks there. And if we can provide feedback right
>>> in the interpreter, why not?
>>>
>>> Only a small number of bug reports have ever come in about this [1,2], but
>>> it does get asked on the upstream help list fairly often.
>>>
>>> Anyway, here's a quick-n-dirty patch to demonstrate what I'm talking
>>> about. Would this be welcome? If so I will test it some more and develop it
>>> further.
>>>
>>>  [1] http://pad.lv/1194712
>>>  [2] http://bugs.debian.org/555646
>>>
>>> [patch snipped]
>>
>>
>> This is a pretty good idea but I guess that your solution would be
>> implemented as a patch to the Debian package.  This would increase the
>> maintenance burden for the DOG.  Another solution would be to incorporate
>> the patch upstream but change it such that it will issue the error/warning
>> messages only in Debian systems.  Debian systems can be detected, for
>> instance, by the presence of the /etc/debian_version file.
>
> We happen to like Debian and it's probably (through Ubuntu) the
> biggest distributor of Octave on GNU-based systems, so I can imagine
> that jwe might approve such a patch, but still, if it's a patch that
> concerns Debian packaging, shouldn't it be only kept in Debian repos?

Rafael's idea is interesting, but that was originally my thinking,
that we probably don't want too much distribution-specific information
in error messages upstream. This would have to be a Debian-specific
patch because that is where the packaging split is determined. If we
add Debian-specific logic upstream, we should add EPEL/Fedora-specific
logic, and so on and so on. How many special cases is too many for
upstream? Probably any n > 1.

My hope is that this patch is lightweight enough, and the files it
touches are stable enough, that it shouldn't be too much of a
maintenance burden for DOG to carry.

> Or should we make the patch more generic and say something like "look
> for packages like this in your generic distribution"?

We could do that upstream, but I suspect that a more generic message
might not mean much to users if we don't tell them exactly what
packages they should be looking for. IOW, we'll start getting messages
on help-octave like "I tried to mkoctfile but I got a message about
installing packages from my generic distribution, what does that
mean?"

-- 
mike