From maintainers-request at octave dot org Mon Nov 28 12:19:08 2005
Subject: Re: Dependence of octave-forge on octave version
From: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
To: Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at debian dot org>
CC: "James R. Phillips" <antiskid56-octave at yahoo dot com>, maintainers@octave.org
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:14:49 -0600

Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

>* James R. Phillips <antiskid56-octave at yahoo dot com> [2005-11-27 17:34]:
>
>  
>
>>I am preparing the new 2.1.72 octave release for cygwin.  I notice now that
>>most of the files in the octave-forge package are in a directory tree with the
>>previous octave  release version (2.1.71) encoded in the path, which means that
>>the octave-forge files are not (by default visible) within the new 2.1.72
>>release, even if they are present.
>>
>>This does not seem to be the case in Debian.  So I wonder - is octave-forge
>>when compiled truly bound to the version of octave installed on the system at
>>that time?  Or would it be compatible with later versions, as long as they
>>maintain the same abi?
>>
>>As it is, it appears I will have to release a new octave-forge version to go
>>with the new octave version.  Is there any easy way to prevent this happening
>>in the future?
>>
>>Advice/comments would be appreciated.
>>    
>>
>
>In Debian, the *.m files are installed in /usr/share/octave/site/m/,
>while the *.oct files are installed in /usr/lib/octave/site/oct/api-v13/.
>This avoids using versioned installation directories.  The API version
>number changes less often than the releases of Octave (it has been
>api-v13 since 2.1.65).
>  
>

As the Fedora package maintainer, I guess I should repond here as well. 
I have always just done things the easy way, installing the files in the 
octave-forge default locations, which causes the situation you 
described. This means there is a new octave-forge release for every 
octave release, though sometimes they coincide anyway. However, I see 
that the Debian approach has some advantages, so I'm considering doing 
the same the next time I release an octave-forge. Is there an easy way 
of extracting the "api-v*" string from octave_config_info or something 
like it?

-Quentin