[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 3.8

[Thomas Weber]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:44:13PM +0100, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> Le mercredi 11 décembre 2013 à 12:34 +0100, Rafael Laboissiere a écrit :
> > * Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2013-12-11 12:24]:
> 
> > > 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.

I think that we are guessing too much here, instead of measuring. Once a
first package is available, we should really measure the impact. That
is:
1) Run batches against the octave, octave-cli and octave-gui binaries.
For the octave binary, runs with both the cli and the gui switch should
be done.
2) Change the packaging scripts such that only the cli version is
available (I presume here that this is possible via a switch to
./configure or by building in a chroot without QT libraries). Run the
batches again. This should only be done locally; there is no need to
distribute these packages.
3) Compare.

Rafael, it seems you are in the best position for running the
measurements - do you have time to do so?

	Thomas