[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#741097: octave: nox package of Octave

[Arno Onken]

Thanks for your quick response.

On 08.03.2014 16:00, Mike Miller wrote:
> Can you explain specifically what you think the advantages of having a
> "nox" version of octave would be? I'm not refuting your request, just
> that you haven't specifically said what the problem with the current
> approach is and what specific benefits would derive from having a nox
> package, just that "these others are doing it".

I have Octave running on a couple of low resource devices which don't
even have X. On these systems, unnecessary dependencies are a waste of
precious space.

> We considered this when starting work on packaging octave 3.8, please
> take a look at the discussions (thread starting at [1]) we had where we
> did look at a few different aspects and decided to keep everything in
> one package for now.

I wasn't aware of this discussion. Your comparison of required disk
space was very informative. Indeed, the Qt dependency doesn't make a big
difference when compared to the additional Java and LLVM dependencies.
But the minimum installation size more than doubles from 3.6.4 to 3.8.0.
So I think a low resources package with more dependencies striped off
would actually be very useful.

> Also keep in mind that 3.8 is a transitional period for the octave
> command-line and GUI modes, upstream may yet make changes about how
> octave is run in one mode or the other. For all we know, there may not
> be a separate octave-cli executable in the 4.0 version. I'm not saying
> this is likely or that I'm in favor of it, just that this is still a
> developmental period and things could change by 4.0.

I see. So it might make sense to reevaluate the issue when 4.0 is out.
Please keep in mind that this is a wishlist bug report. I understand
that this might be too special to be worth the additional effort. For
me, it would certainly be very useful to have an additional low
resources package. The space requirements of Octave have grown slowly in
the past, but I think this leap is unprecedented.

Thanks,
Arno