quick recipe for installing latest Octave-forge for Debian users

[Francesco Potorti`]

If you are a Debian user and you want to get the whole octave-forge for
your brand new Octave 2.9 or, better, Octave 3.0, you should install
octave3.0-headers, download the octave-forge bundle from sourceforge,
for example like this:

  $ cd /tmp
  $ wget 
http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/octave/octave-forge-bundle-20071212.tar.gz

and then, as root, do like this:

  # cd /usr/local/src
  # tar -zxf /tmp/octave-forge-bundle-20071212.tar.gz
  # octave3.0 -q
  octave3.0> f=glob("/usr/local/src/octave-forge-bundle-20071212/main/*tar.gz");
  octave3.0> for i=1:length(f); disp(["  installing " f{i} " ..."]);
  octave3.0> eval(["pkg install " f{i}],'printf (" ---------> failed:\n%s", 
lasterr ());');
  octave3.0> endfor

You will get errors, unless you have the necessary libraries installed,
but the messages should help you guess what are the necessary ones.
Then you can rerun the whole command or just the pkg() command for the
failed packages.

Disclaimer: notice that running complex and error-prone commands as root
is dangerous, so don't do this on production systems, there are more
secure ways to obtain the same results.

-- 
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