Re: Developing Octave-Forge packages

[Søren Hauberg]

man, 27 12 2010 kl. 08:30 -0600, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> Hi, I started working on Debian bug #607071 yesterday:
> 
>      http://bugs.debian.org/607071

For what it's worth, this package seems to work for me (though others
are having grave troubles).

> And I'm just looking on advice on how to do this. I am not even sure
> how to setup a development environment. If I need to make frequent
> changes to the C++ sources, thus recompile them and test them
> frequently, how do I do this?

Just run 'make' in the 'src' directory. Testing is, however, a bit more
tedious as the 'symbolic' package uses PKG_ADD to ensure that 'autoload'
gets called in the right way. I don't have any great tricks here.

> I notice that that Makefile included
> with the package does something weird about disabling the compilation
> environment once it's been built once. Why?

Which makefile is that? I haven't noticed such behaviour of the one in
the 'src' directory.

> I've got an svn checkout
> in addition to the distributed tarball, but I'm at a loss as to how
> people ordinarily develop these packages, or compile in debug symbols.

I'm a crappy programmer so I usually don't bother with debug symbols; I
just use good ol' printf...

Things are straight-forward when packages don't use PKG_ADD files, as
you can just start Octave in the 'src' directory and run 'make' when
you've changed the C++ files. With PKG_ADD files, I don't really have
any good tricks :-(

Søren