[Pkg-octave-devel] New auto-loading policy

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2015-04-05 22:07]:

> Le dimanche 05 avril 2015 à 10:04 +0200, Rafael Laboissiere a écrit :
>> In the process of upgrading the octave-control package for the new
>> upstream version (2.8.0), I saw this entry in the NEWS file:
>>
>>    ** In order to comply with modified Octave Forge rules, the package no longer
>>       auto-loads.  See "help pkg" for details on auto-loading.
>>
>> Where can these "modified Octave Forge rules" be found?
>>
>> I am remember correctly, we decided to enforce auto-loading in the Debian 
>> packages.  Is it time to revise our rules?
>
> I seem to remember that some time ago there was a discussion on the 
> Octave lists about removing package autoloading. This seems confirmed by 
> this message:
>
> http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/educate-after-quot-pkg-install-quot-td4669189.html#a4669190
>
> Maybe John or Jordi could comment on this issue?
>
> If this is confirmed, we should probably remove all our "autoload: yes" 
> patches, to better reflect upstream decision.

I think it makes sense to remove all autoload-yes patches.  I do not 
remember why we took the decision of enforcing autoload for all 
Octave-Forge packages in Debian, but it was probably not a good decision. 
Any decent scripting language requires that users explicitly load the 
needed modules, like Python ("import module") and R ("library(module)").

I prepared the changes in my local Git repositories and will push them if 
nobody objects.

Rafael