[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 3.8

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2013 12:24:24 +0100, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> Le mardi 10 décembre 2013 à 23:27 +0100, Rafael Laboissiere a écrit :
>> * Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2013-12-10 12:59]:
> 
>>> Also, there are now 3 top-level binaries instead of one: octave, 
>>> octave-cli and octave-gui. I am inclined to ship them in the same 
>>> binary package (octave), but another option would be to create another 
>>> binary package without the GUI stuff, for systems with limited 
>>> resources.
>>
>> Yes, please, split the packages.  People running Octave from batches 
>> (like I do, sometimes) will appreciate it.
> 
> 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).

I don't see the added complexity, maybe I am missing something. The
octave package will contain /usr/bin/octave and /usr/bin/octave-cli, as
well as all the oct-files as it does today. This is all that is needed
to run CLI-mode octave, run m-file scripts, and install Forge packages.

The new octave-gui package will contain /usr/bin/octave-gui and depend
on the octave package. It's an added layer instead of an alternative.

> 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.

The Qt dependencies come in through liboctgui, so if we do split the
package, that library will have to be split as well. So there could be
an octave-gui package with the executable and a liboctgui0 package with
the library. There is no liboctgui-dev because no header files are
installed for the GUI library.

-- 
mike