Re: Read-only file system error when installing a package

[Steven Evans]

Hello Mike.
    I just read through Octave's documentation on package 
installation.  The documentation is fairly clear about global 
installation.  I think my confusion came about based on what I actually 
did in order to invoke global installation.
    According to Octave's package installation documentation, using the 
global option, with the pkg command, would force global installation.  
If I'm understanding it correctly the complete command would be "pkg 
install -forge -global parallel".
    I didn't use that command, but I'm wondering if the global 
installation had something to do with the way I used flatpak when 
installing Octave 5.1.0.  My approach was based on the following link:

https://flatpak.org/setup/Ubuntu/

    "sudo" is used in order to install flatpak.  Maybe I didn't reboot, 
as step 4 suggests, before installing the Octave app.  As a result, 
maybe this triggered the package to try to install differently, since I 
had to use "sudo flatpak run org.octave.Octave", in order to get Octave 
to start.  I can only guess that that's what caused the installation to 
deviate from the default without using the global option with the pkg 
command.
    As for the struct error message, I do think it could be clearer.  
In addition to the message, if it also said, "ensure that you have the 
struct package installed", along with the command "pkg install -forge 
struct", I would have known to install struct with that command.
    In order to learn that I needed to install struct, I googled the 
complete error message.  That search lead me to the following link:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-octave/2016-10/msg00104.html

    This person asked why they had to install struct first, which made 
me realize that I had to install struct first.
    Now that I know all of this, I better understand how to interpret 
the error message.  However, if it had told me that I needed to install 
struct, there would have been no original confusion.  I thought I just 
needed to update my version of struct, which caused me to upgrade Octave.

Thanks again for your time and help,

Steven

On 05/19/2019 01:48 PM, Mike Miller wrote:
> Hi Steven,
>
> Kai has responded to your main question about installing the parallel
> package, I just wanted to respond to a couple details in your message.
>
> On Sat, May 18, 2019 at 19:20:03 -0400, Steven Evans wrote:
> >      In your message, you said that I was trying to do a global install.
> > Does typing "pkg install -forge parallel" mean that I'm trying to do a
> > global install?
> Can you please read "help pkg" and let us know if that describes the
> difference between a global and local install or if the docs need some
> work? Any suggestions?
>
> > error: the following dependencies were unsatisfied:
> >     parallel needs struct >= 1.0.12
> […]
> > I later found out that I'm receiving that message because I have
> > to install struct, which is a different package.
> Is there any way this error message could be improved to make it more
> clear to you that the user needs to install or upgrade a package named
> "struct" with the 'pkg' command?

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