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Re: Geometry Chapter of the manual


From: Thomas Weber
Subject: Re: Geometry Chapter of the manual
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:22:51 +0200

Am Dienstag, den 24.07.2007, 21:00 +0200 schrieb David Bateman:
> Quentin Spencer wrote:
> 
> > The addition of the sparse matrix dependencies seemed to cause a fair
> > amount of confusion on the help list. I have no problem with adding more
> > dependencies, but maybe we need to make it clearer to people who want to
> > compile octave themselves that they are optional. I don't know how to do
> > that--any ideas? Maybe there should be a document somewhere telling
> > people how to install the development packages for common
> > distributions--that one seems to trip people up a lot.
> > 
> 
> Quentin,
> 
> Yes adding a dependency means that Octave becomes progressively harder
> to build. However, it also means the addition of new functionality with
> the minimum work on the part of the Octave developers. There is a
> compromise to achieve hear and I think its normal that the addition of
> each new dependency to the core of Octave should be considered on a case
> by case basis with some discussion of interested parties.
> 
> So in particular, in your opinion, does the inclusion of the convhull,
> convhulln, delaunay, delaunay3, delaunayn, griddata, tsearch, voronoi
> and voronoin function justify the inclusion of the dependency on QHull?
> Are these functions of sufficiently large value to accept the cost of a
> harder build of Octave?

I think distribution maintainers are actually the wrong persons to ask.
If the dependency is already packaged for the distribution, adding it to
Octave means only a very small change to the build scripts[1]. If it's
not already packaged, the decision whether the dependency should be
packaged will come up, but packagers have some experience with that and
know whom to ask if packaging the dependency turns out to be too
difficult.

The real question is the "normal" user at home who wants to have the
latest and greatest CVS snapshot with everything including the kitchen
sink: compiling everything yourself can be hard and surely is
time-consuming.

That said, I see not alternative to adding more dependencies. It's a
waste of resources to re-invent the wheel (although I'm biased, as qhull
is already packaged for Debian ;) )

[1] At least in Debian, but I guess that's true for RPM-based systems as
well. 

        Thomas



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