octave version

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-May-1997, Andreas Weingessel <address@hidden> wrote:

| I just installed octave version 2.0.5.90. Before that, we had the
| 970430-snapshot installed. The changes of this snapshot are not
| included in the 2.0.5.90-version.

| Are these two versions currently developed in parallel? Will the
| changes of the 970430-snapshot be included in one of the next official
| versions?

I'm releasing 2.0.6 to fix the bugs that have been reported since
2.0.5.  There are some relatively serious ones, like the problem with
indexing that has been reported about 3 times now in the last 2 weeks.

2.0.5.90 contains those fixes.  The other snapshot contains the
sources that will eventually become 2.1.  The new features won't be in
2.0.6 because they are really major changes, and I'm sure there are
bugs.  I don't know when 2.1 will be ready, so I want 2.0.6 to be as
bug-free and reliable as possible.

I created 2.0.5.90 by starting with the 2.0.5 distribution.  Then I
applied the patches that I had saved or sent to bug-octave.  Next I
looked through the ChangeLogs and applied patches from the RCS files.
Since it's very likely that I missed something in this process, I
decided to make a test release or two to try to keep from releasing
something with really obvious problems.

I know this is not really the right way to do this.  After 2.1, I'm
going to try to do this correctly using CVS in the way God intended.  :-)

| In our current configuration it is not possible to have both version
| installed at the same time, so we have to decide for one of these two
| versions.

Even though the version number is included in several places when
installing Octave, I know that it's not really enough to allow
multiple versions to actually be correctly installed at the same
time.  Until that is properly fixed, you can use

  configure --prefix=/usr/local/octave/2.0.5.90
  configure --prefix=/usr/local/octave/ss-970430

and so on.  Then you can change your path to selet the version you
want, or create some symbolic links in /usr/local to set up a default
version.

If someone has the time to look into it, it would be nice if we could
come up with a directory structure that will actually work for people
who want to keep multiple versions installed.  I think the $prefix/lib
and $prefix/include/octave directories are still problems, but there
may be others.

Thanks,

jwe