Re: signal-1.0.11 and shadowing of core library functions

[Olaf Till]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 03:18:52PM +0200, Juergen Rose wrote:
> After installing signal-1.0.11, which also installs miscellaneous-1.0.9,
> optim-1.0.12 and specfun-1.0.9 as dependencies under Gentoo, octave
> complains after starting about shadowing of core library functions:
> 
> address@hidden:/home/rose/Txt/projects/Spectral_analysis(23)$ octave
> GNU Octave, version 3.4.0
> Copyright (C) 2011 John W. Eaton and others.
> This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.
> There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
> FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  For details, type `warranty'.
> 
> Octave was configured for "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".
> 
> Additional information about Octave is available at
> http://www.octave.org.
> 
> Please contribute if you find this software useful.
> For more information, visit http://www.octave.org/help-wanted.html
> 
> Read http://www.octave.org/bugs.html to learn how to submit bug reports.
> 
> For information about changes from previous versions, type `news'.
> 
> warning:
> function 
> /usr/libexec/octave/packages/miscellaneous-1.0.9/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-api-v47+/hex2num.oct
>  shadows a core library function
> warning: function /usr/share/octave/packages/optim-1.0.12/fminbnd.m
> shadows a core library function
> warning: function /usr/share/octave/packages/specfun-1.0.9/erfcx.m
> shadows a built-in function
> octave:1> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Is this a serious problem or can I ignore it?
> 
> Regards Juergen

You won't be able to use Octaves functions with these names, only the
respective functions of Octave Forge. As for miscellaneous and optim,
later versions don't provide these functions. specfun still provides
erfcx, but this is probably a bug in specfun. You can either ignore
it, or, if you need erfcx of core Octave, manually delete
/usr/share/octave/packages/specfun-1.0.9/erfcx.m.

If you don't install Octave Forge packages manually, but stick to your
distributions dependency system, you probably can't update package
versions easily, so what was said to erfcx.m also applies to fminbnd.m
and hex2num.oct.

Olaf