[Pkg-octave-devel] Regarding octave-interval packaging

[Oliver Heimlich]

Hi,

I consider several changes regarding the packaging of octave-interval.
Please tell me if this goes in a wrong direction.

1. I want to change the documentation format from PDF to HTML. According
to [1], HTML is the preferred format anyway. The next upstream version
is going to contain animations [2] in the manual, which don't work so
well in PDF.

2. I want to strip unit tests (.tst files) from the Debian package. The
unit tests take up a significant amount of space and get executed /
verified by buildd already. I think that they are not of interest for
the general user.

3. I want to split the package into an arch-independent package and an
arch-dependent package, since 90% of the package goes into /usr/share as
Lintian says. I still have to figure out the correct dependencies
between the packages.

The natural runtime dependency will be:
   octave-interval-common depends on octave-interval

The user is probably going to head for octave-interval. Is a
“Recommends” dependency enough to also install octave-interval-common?
Circular dependency should probably be avoided.

Also you need octave-interval to build octave-interval-common, however
octave-interval-common must only be build once. If we upload a new
version for the package(s), the build servers don't have to build the
arch-independent package except for reproducibility testing, right?

Best regards
Oliver


[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s12.4
[2]
https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/interval/ci/default/tree/doc/image/cameleon-animation.svg