Re: octave + octave-forge via Debian's apt-get

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 08:53:40PM -0600, A. Danial wrote:
> I've installed octave and octave-forge on a Debian machine via the
> convenient apt-get utility, ie,
> 
>   apt-get install octave
>   apt-get install octave-forge 

I rebuilt octave-forge and octave-sp with the newest octave2.1 last night;
sorry for having slipped that while I was busy getting a new Quantian [1]
out of the door (which shipped with a non-matching octave-forge, alas).

> It leaves me with octave version 2.1.53 but I don't know how to 
> deterimine the octave-forge version from the octave prompt, or which 
> octave-forge functions are available.

This is Unix, so

$ man apt-get           # leads to 'apt-cache show octave-forge'
$ man dpkg              # leads to 'dpkg -L octave-forge'

All this is arguably a little confusing and intimidating to folks new to
Debian. My personal favourite is wajig, a 'nuts-to-bolts' frontend to more
than half a dozen package management tools. Now also with a little Gui
'gjig'.  IIRC only in unstable, but will work in testing too.

> http://packages.debian.org/stable/math/octave-forge suggests that
> even an old version of octave-forge would give me the 'sparse' function
> but it isn't available on my Debian machine after the apt-get installs.
> Does some system or environment variable or .octaverc setting need to
> be made to enable octave-forge functions?     -- Al

It's "all Octave".  The way things work right now, binary modules (i.e.
.oct) are installed in a version-dependent path forcing me to rebuild 
octave-forge for every new Octave releases. When those come quickfire as
right now, things may slip for a few days.

Rafael, if you're listening in, we also could do with rebuilt octave-gpc,
octave-statdataml, octave-plplot.

Regards, Dirk

[1] As always at http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/

-- 
The relationship between the computed price and reality is as yet unknown.  
                                             -- From the pac(8) manual page



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