Re: Integrating functions with with constant arguments

[Thomas Weber]

Hi, 

Am Dienstag, den 15.08.2006, 10:47 -0500 schrieb Jordi Gutierrez
Hermoso:
> On 15/08/06, John Dalton <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I've just discovered that Debian unstable, which I am running,
> > maintains two packages: octave2.1 and octave2.9.
> > It's possibly the wrong forum, but does anyone
> > know why Debian would do this?

We did this because end users out there want it :)

Seriously, there are some external packages that are supposed to work
with Octave 2.1. We lack the time to check if they can use Octave 2.9
without problems and if the respective upstream authors don't switch, so
don't we. 

OTOH, Octave 2.9 has lots of new features and our users want them as
well. Maintaining them both is not that much of a problem (2.1 is
somewhat frozen by John), so we do it. 


> What I do think is kinda strange in Debian is the dependencies between
> these packages. For example, octave-forge depends on octave2.1 yet I
> believe I have seen some of the 'forge functions use functionality
> from octave2.9. It's given me some trouble sometimes, since I have
> both Octave branches installed, and some 'forge functions work in 2.1
> and some in 2.9... I think. *shrug*

Until a few days ago, octave-forge was a real package, compiled against
Octave 2.1. We have changed this and now you can install octave2.1-forge
and octave2.9-forge. Please note that these packages are at different
upstream versions, since the latest release of octave-forge is supposed
to be compiled against Octave 2.9. The package octave-forge is now a
'meta-package'; upon installation, it will pull in the default
octave2.X-forge package (currently octave2.1-forge).


Regards
        Thomas