[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 3.8

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2013-12-11 12:24]:
>
> I just realized that there is one added complexity with this approach. 
> We will have two packages providing octave: one will be just "octave" 
> like now (containing the binary which can do both GUI and 
> command-line), and "octave-cli" (containing the binary which can do 
> only command-line). It would therefore be logic to modify most reverse 
> dependencies, like the 'Forge packages, to depend on "octave | 
> octave-cli", in order not to force people to install the GUI-capable 
> version (which would defeat the purpose of splitting the packages).

Yes, this must be done. This is not really a big deal since most of the 
depending packages are under control of the DOG and this change can be 
automated.

> I am not sure this is worth the effort. The only benefit of splitting 
> the package is that people with low disk space will not be forced to 
> install Qt. That does not seem like a huge gain.

It is also a matter of RAM, since octave-gui, when launched, will load 
the whole Qt libraries into memory, which is undesirable for batch 
processes.  Anyway, before taking the decision, I think we need to look 
at some data, like the difference in resources (HD and RAM) involved in 
each case.

Rafael