Re: Failure (Re: How to use octave-forge?)

[Christoph Dalitz]

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 08:50:02 -0600
Dirk Eddelbuettel <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > 
> > I would suggest using EPM (http://www.easysw.com/epm/), which can create
> > DEB-, RPM-, OSX- or whatever packages from a single *.list file.
> 
> It's a nice enough idea in theory, but in practice I suspect that it won't
> be strong enough to deal reliably with library dependencies
>
Incidentally I had sent a patch for EPM to its author several weeks ago, which
adds detection of shared library dependencies for DEB packages (unlike rpm,
dpkg cannot handle this itself). Unfortunately the patch has not made it into
the recent 3.7. release of EPM.

> and pre/post installation niceties.
> The .deb packages do more than just 'configure; make; make install'.
> 
You are right that EPM created packages cannot fully replace distribution
specific custom packages, whose maintainers put a lot of work into the
OSification of the package like adding window manger entries or just some
odd Debian peculiarities ("Put the documentation into /usr/share/doc and
add a link form /usr/doc, but handle this via postinstall/preremove scripts
because dpkg cannot deal with symbolic links...").

OTOH OS specific custom packages usually require the latest version of the
OS environment (Debian testing, SuSE 9, ...), which makes their installation 
often
problematic.

Thus unoffical (from the OS point of view) official (from the octave point of 
view)
binary packages offered on the octave site were a good thing for users who only
want to install octave. For such packages, EPM would be an ideal solution 
because
all native package formats could be generated without much work.
In the case of Linux, these distributions should either be made in a 
conservative
environment (libc5, gcc2) or statically linked for maximum compatibility.

When I have some spare time, I will write an EPM-list file for octave and test
the creation of DEB and RPM packages. When I have access to an OSX box (maybe
after April 2004), I will also test the generation of OSX native packages 
(provided
Apple has added an unstall option to its package manager in OSX 10.3; otherwise
OSX native packages might do more harm than good).

Christoph



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------