Re: Examples doesn't seems to work

[Thomas Weber]

Am Freitag, den 14.09.2007, 13:46 -0400 schrieb John W. Eaton:
> On 14-Sep-2007, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> 
> | David Bateman wrote:
> | > Abdul Rahman Riza wrote:
> | >   
> | >> Dear Mr. DAvid  Bateman,
> | >>
> | >> I am Using ubuntu Feisty Fawn. How to install GNUplot properly?
> | >>
> | >> Rgds
> | >> Riza
> | >>     
> | >
> | > apt-get update
> | > apt-get install gnuplot
> | >   
> | 
> | Is there any reason why the Debian octave packages don't have gnuplot as 
> | a mandatory dependency?
> 
> I guess that question belongs on the
> address@hidden list.

I hope you don't mind me answering here ;)

For Debian packages, there are three kind of dependencies: Depends,
Recommends, Suggests. "Depends" is a hard dependency, ie you can't
install a package without its dependency (eg, Octave depends on fftw3).
The other two are soft dependencies, where recommends is something that
the average user will normally want and suggests is something that might
make sense, but most people can do without it.

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps

For Octave, gnuplot was a "suggest" until the 2.9.10 packages, when we
changed it to "recommends". Most package frontends (aptitude, and soon
apt-get itself) will install "recommends" by default. If someone wants
to have a look at the rest, see

http://packages.debian.org/sid/octave2.9



> | want octave without X, but maybe just for Ubuntu, which is meant to be 
> | desktop oriented, it would make sense to somehow make octave 
> | automatically install gnuplot.
> 
> So this is a problem for the people who make Ubuntu packages?

Ubuntu Feisty still has the 2.9.9 packages, where gnuplot is at
"suggest". I think there is some general misunderstanding about Ubuntu
packges. The vast majority of them is never touched by a human. Ubuntu
takes Debian source packages and recompiles them, occasionally changing
a build-dependency when the need for it aries (library changes are a
typical cause for that).



> But anyway, I agree that it would probably be best to have a gnuplot
> dependency, but I'm sure someone will disagree because they don't want
> to have to pull in all of X for some reason.  

That would be both Rafael and me :) Rafael doesn't seem to use gnuplot,
while I often need Octave in chroots without X. 

So, in summary: a hard dependency on gnuplot is undesired, the soft
dependency has already been bumped.

        Thomas