[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 3.8

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Mike Miller <mtmiller at debian.org> [2013-12-14 14:24]:
>
> The thing I think is awkward is having octave depend on octave-cli just 
> because that's where we happen to stuff the oct-files. Rather both are 
> more like alternatives with different levels of functionality. I'm 
> comparing with emacs, gnuplot, or vim packaging for what seem to me 
> like similar packaging models: emacs does not depend on emacs-nox, 
> gnuplot-x11 does not depend on gnuplot-nox, etc.

One way to make this choice appear less awkward is to think that the CLI 
is "contained" into the GUI.

An alternative would be to create an extra package for the *.oct files 
and we would end up with this set of packages:

    octave (contains GUI executable, arch-dependent)
    octave-cli (contains CLI executable, arch-dependent)
    octave-common (contains *.m, arch-independent)
    octave-common-bin (contains *.oct, arch-dependent)

> Anyway, the pressing question is still whether to split the package at 
> all, and I took Thomas' point that we should have some analysis. I 
> tested installing octave 3.6.4 and 3.8.0~rc1 in a clean unstable amd64 
> chroot to compare dependencies and disk space. I hope the following is 
> useful.
>
> [...]

Thanks for this work.

Just out of curiosity, I quickly checked the RAM consumption on a remote 
amd64 server: just after being launched, octave-gui takes a total virtual 
space of 761 Mb (from which 31 Mb are shared) while octave-cli takes 308 
Mb (20 Mb shared).

Rafael