From maintainers-request at octave dot org Sun Nov 13 08:39:03 2005
Subject: Re: Octave 2.9.4 available for ftp
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
Cc: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 09:38:56 -0500

On 12-Nov-2005, Quentin Spencer wrote:

| 2. It appears that the PKG_ADD file in
| /usr/libexec/octave/2.9.4/oct/<canonical_host_type> now contains 
| commands with absolute path names (it didn't as of the last release), 
| which are created at the make install stage. This is no problem for 
| someone building and installing locally, but in packaging sytems that 
| install in a temporary path (creating a deb or rpm, for example), the 
| path name could be wrong (I learned this the hard way) and require some 
| post-processing using perl or sed.

The commands are of the form

  autoload ("fcn", "$octlibdir/file.oct");

(with the actual value of $octlibdir substituted when the PKG_ADD file
is generated) so how is it that octlibdir changes when you run make
install?  Are you using a value of $prefix at install time that is
different from the one used at configure time?  If so, I'd suggest
using $DESTDIR for this purpose instead of changing $prefix.  Is there
some reason you can't do that?  Do the package tools assume it is OK
to change prefix at install time?

Maybe a better solution would be to generate the lines

  autoload ("fcn", strcat (strrep (octave_config_info ("octlibdir"),
                                   octave_config_info ("octlibdir"),
                                   OCTAVE_HOME)),
                           filesep,
                           "file.oct");

instead.  Then this would also work if someone moved their installed
copy of Octave and set OCTAVE_HOME appropriately.

jwe