Re: quick recipe for installing latest Octave-forge for Debian users

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Jan-2008, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| On 17/01/2008, Francesco Potorti` <address@hidden> wrote:
| > 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,
| 
| Ack, this is embarrassing to me as someone who wants to contribute to
| the Debian packaging of Octave. The fact that you had to post such an
| ugly solution means that we as Debian packagers have failed you. :-(

Also, a general comment about "installing all of Octave Forge".  I
don't think that should ever be the default.  I know, people want to
just install a single package (give me everything; I don't want to
have to think about it).  But that can cause some real confusion.
Certainly we should not be packaging the NaN package as part of the
default installation as it unconditionally replaces some basic
functions in Octave.  It's probably not good to allow people to
unknowingly install that package as it can break existing code in
nonobvious ways.  But if you do decide to provide a meta package that
installs "everything" please consider omitting packages that
unconditionally replace functions that come with Octave.

jwe