Re: Octave v4.4 in PPA

[Richard Crozier]

On 29/05/18 17:14, Mike Miller wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 14:25:18 +0100, Richard Crozier wrote:
> > really? I thought one of the purposes of an Ubuntu PPA (Personal Package
> > Archive) was to make the latest versions of a package available before it
> > was packaged officially in a distribution.
>
> That is one of the purposes of some PPAs, but not this PPA.
>
> The purpose of this PPA is to backport the latest packaged version of
> Octave in Ubuntu's development release to the LTS releases. The current
> version of Octave in Ubuntu 18.10 is 4.2.2.
>
> > For a PPA which users have to actively seek out and install, I think there
> > might be less expectation of every forge package working correctly. It would
> > be nice to at least have the option to use the latest release in a
> > relatively easy way. I'm asking because I have a user who wants to use some
> > software I've written which only works in 4.4 and it's really quite
> > difficult to get 4.4 if you don't build it yourself from source, which is
> > non-trivial for the average user.
>
> On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 09:33:30 -0400, avlas wrote:
> > I used to use the ppa but now there is a flatpak package, which may
> > replace it: https://github.com/flathub/org.octave.Octave
>
> Yes, I also recommend you take a look at the Flatpak package instead of
> the PPA, which will give you the latest version of Octave immediately on
> any distribution.

I recognise that Flatpak is the better option in principle, but it is 
not available on Ubuntu 14.04 which is an LTS release which is supported 
until 2019.

Regarding Flatpak, I saw there is some sandboxing for Flatpak 
applications, can Octave access system libraries (in /usr/local I mean) 
and so on for linking to oct/mex files? Also, can octave use sockets 
when installed with Flatpak to communicate with non-Flatpak applications?

I couldn't find any specific information on this, and I'm using Mint 
Linux 17.3 (based off Ubuntu 14.04) so I can't install it to just try 
for myself.

Thanks,

Richard



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