Bugzilla Bug 20087

Hello,

I am submitting a new ebuild for the octave-forge library. This software is an
add-on package for GNU octave (a MATLAB clone). This package includes many of
the functions not found in the standard octave distribution that enhance its
functionality to more closely match the functionality of the standard
functionality in MATLAB.

I am attaching a tarball containing the octave-forge ebuild; I will separately
add a file containing the terms of the octave-forge license (this is meant to be
placed into /usr/portage/licenses). The attached ebuild is for the version of
octave currently in Portage (2.1.40 at the time of this writing). updated
versions of both octave and octave-forge are available, but need to be kept in
sync with each other.

Additionally, this ebuild depends on the successful inclusion of the
qhull-1.3-r1 ebuild (bug #15446).

I would suggest that this ebuild should go into app-sci/octave-forge (the
attached tarball contains the ebuild in such a directory structure).

Brent Redeker

P.S. Although I am reasonably sure it is defect free, this is only my 2nd
ebuild, so I apologize in advance if there are any problems.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Created an attachment (id=11237) [details]
octave-forge-2002.11.30.ebuild

Created an attachment (id=11238) [details]
octave-forge (license file)

This is the license which governs the octave-forge package. This probably
should be added to the Portage licenses repository.

Can't get around to fixing this anytime soon, sorry.

Created an attachment (id=12300) [details]
Updated ebuild (v2003.02.22) which supports GNU/Octave v2.1.44.

This is the latest version of the octave-forge package and it requires
GNU/Octave v2.1.44. I have submitted an updated ebuild for GNU/Octave v2.1.44
(see Bug #21483)

Created an attachment (id=12320) [details]
Updated ebuild (v2003.02.22) which supports GNU/Octave v2.1.44

Updated the SRC_URI variable to properly deal with the sourceforge mirror, as
suggested by andrd (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=35093).

Hi Brent, Shaun.

Thanks for submission!
First comment on the license:
AFAICS the license is essentially "as-is" without significant deviation from typical provisions of this lycense type. As such it should be covered by our umbrella license "as-is" which essentially contains the central as-is clause plus tells users to read actual license that came with package for particulars.

Unless there are any objections I'll just put "as-is" in LICENSE field and make sure the text of liicene gets installed under /usr/share/doc/${PF}.

George

Another comment.

I see the dependency on octave is set at "=" instead of ">=". What is the purpose of this? Looking at the ebuild I cannot see any "hotspots" which would indicate that octave-forge would only build with this specific version of octave.
Well, I guess I'll see in a moment, but I wanted to say that you should avoid "=" dependencies unless absolutely necessary.

George

Hi,

I don't think there is any problem with using ">=" condition instead of "=". Thank you for taking the time to fix that, and the license issue.

Like I said in my comment for bug #15446, I am unfortunately able to test out this ebuild right now, but I appreciate the work you've put into it anyway.

Brent

The idea I believe is that octave-forge has a very open and relaxed policy on
accepting submitted code whereas that for octave is somewhat more restrictive
and the required quality somewhat higher.

octave-forge generally includes extensions to octave but it also contains a
number of fixes. Code slowly makes its way from octave-forge into the base
octave distribution. As a result, octave-forge has in the past been packaged
and released against a specific version of octave, hence the '=' rather than
'>=' dependency. 

In practice I have used most parts of octave-forge v2003.02.22 with a number of
version of octave between 2.1.44 and 2.1.49 however, I have on a number of
occasions had to drive the build/install process manually.  

Shaun

Created an attachment (id=13626) [details]
Updated ebuild (v2003.06.02) supports GNU/Octave >=2.1.39

This is an updated ebuild for the latest version of octave-forge. octave-forge
should now compile cleanly and work with all version of GNU/Octave from v2.1.39
to the latest version (v2.1.49). GNU/Octave v2.1.49 was recently added to
portage.

Note that according to the octave-forge page, significant work has been done
back porting octave-forge to previous version of GNU/Octave. According to the
release notes this version of octave-forge should build with all version of
GNU/Octave greater than v2.1.36, BUT not all functions will work with versions
less then v2.1.40. I have therefore taken the conservative approach and
modified the DEPEND variable to require GNU/Octave >=2.1.40. Review this
decision as you see fit.

Regards,

Shaun

Hi uys.

Shaun: thanks for an update. I have processed and committed it. Please test.
Also I marked 2003.02.22 and octave-2.1.49 stable.

George

reclosing the bug