In the ebuild an useflag should be used to enable/disable a functionality, in the case of octave the useflag gnuplot is misleading because it just adds a dependency but octave operations don't effectively depend on useflag status. On my system the gnuplot useflag is not enabled but sci-visualization/gnuplot is installed due to another package dep and octave shows support for gnuplot graphics backend: octave:2> available_graphics_toolkits ans = { [1,1] = fltk [1,2] = gnuplot }
The is no configure option for gnuplot, as can be verified with: ./configure --help |grep gnuplot So all the ebuild does with the gnuplot use flag is to add the dependency: gnuplot? ( sci-visualization/gnuplot ) I do not see how we could improve on the current behaviour.
(In reply to Mark Wright from comment #1) > The is no configure option for gnuplot, as can be verified with: > > ./configure --help |grep gnuplot > > So all the ebuild does with the gnuplot use flag is to add the dependency: > > gnuplot? ( sci-visualization/gnuplot ) > > I do not see how we could improve on the current behaviour. The devmanual suggests to use post install messages for this kind of dependencies. I'm wondering if portage is missing some functionality in supporting optional runtime dependencies, i.e. deps that a package can autodetect at runtime and, when missing, don't cause package failure but only reduced functionality.
gnuplot is a requirement at configure time actually, as configure.ac shows. feel free to submit a patch to avoid this automagic and re-open this bug. meanwhile we follow upstream way.
