[ANNOUNCE] Octave and Octave-forge in Fedora Extras

[Quentin Spencer]

Well, it took longer than I expected, but official Fedora Extras
versions of octave 2.1.71 and the most recent octave-forge have now been
released for Fedora Core 4. I haven't upgraded to FC4 yet, but I have
heard that Fedora Extras is enabled by default, and it includes the
updating tool yum, similar to Debian's apt-get. On a new FC4 install,
you should now be able to install the latest versions of octave and
octave-forge with the command "yum install octave-forge". Users who plan
to create .oct files will also want to install octave-devel. The FC4
release of octave now includes support for FFTW, which was not available
in previous official Fedora releases.

An octave-forge package has also been released to Fedora Extras for FC3.
For information about setting up Extras on FC3, see
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/UsingExtras . This package is
built for the octave version in Fedora Core 3, which is actually quite
old (2.1.57), so I really don't recommend it for users who want the
latest octave features. Instead, more up-to-date RPMs for 2.1.71 for
Fedora Core 3 can be found at
ftp://coffee.phys.unm.edu/pub/octave/RPMS/i386/ . I don't intend to
update those RPMs any further.

For the future, I plan to keep the FC4 octave release current with any
future 2.1.x releases. I will begin working on 2.9.x packages in the
development branch of Fedora Extras, which is intended for Fedora Core
5. Hopefully we will get to octave 3.0 before then (I think FC5 is
supposed to be 6-9 months away). The one missing feature from these
octave packages is ATLAS, which is a fairly tricky packaging job, and is
next on my list of things to do.

-Quentin



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