From help-request at octave dot org Fri Jun 11 13:28:07 2004 Subject: Re: [OctDev] Octave-forge Development (fwd) From: Paul Kienzle To: "Tom G. Smith (Smitty)" Cc: Octave_post , Ted Tower Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 14:26:39 -0400 On Jun 11, 2004, at 1:05 PM, John W. Eaton wrote: > On 11-Jun-2004, Tom G. Smith (Smitty) wrote: > > | I finally got a working octave, but only by using rpms, and even > | then I had to force it it ignore dependencies. Without --nodeps I > | got this error: > | > | error: Failed dependencies: > | libqhull >= 0:2003.1 is needed by octave-forge-2004.02.12-2mdk > | > | But, as you can see below, the qhull I was installing *was* >= > 2003.1, and > | I haven't located an rpm for a release any more recent than 2003.1-1: > > It's unfortunate that there are problems with the RPM files that you > found, but ensuring that the packages for every distribution work > correctly is a bit beyond the scope of the Octave and Octave-forge > projects. If you want to see the packages fixed, then I suggest that > you report the problems you have with the RPM packages to whoever > built them. octave-forge/admin/RPM has spec files in it. I don't know how distribution specific they are. I think the binaries for a particular distribution belong on a distribution specific site (like debian, fedora, fink, ports) except in the cases where there are no distribution specific sites (windows, os x native), in which case they can live on octave-forge. Given that nobody is paid to maintain octave-forge, it is up to the users of a particular distribution to volunteer to keep the packages up to date. Regarding the dependency problems of octave-forge, I would prefer to see recommendations rather than requirements for packages like qhull, ginac, gsl, etc. The functions should just work if the supporting libraries are installed, otherwise a nice error message should pop up saying that a particular package needs to be installed first. Does anybody know how to do this in a platform independent way? One more thing, ~3000 downloads of the octave-forge source, ~20000 downloads of windows binary. If you all could convince your institutions to donate about $10 per user per year to the University of Wisconsin foundation: http://www.uwfoundation.wisc.edu/index.html designated for Octave development, that would be enough to support two full time employees. Paul Kienzle pkienzle at users dot sf dot net ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------