rpm packaging of octave packages

[Orion Poplawski]

I'm starting to take a look at creating a standard method of building rpms of 
octave packages for Fedora.  I'm starting with the old octave-forge package as 
a starting point.

Overall structure so far is:

- Use pkg build <dest> <source>.tar.gz to build a binary .tar.gz
- Use pkg install binary.tar.gz with global_list and local_list overridden (do 
we need to do both?) to point to the rpm build root directories.
- On rpm install/uninstall run "pkg rebuild"

Seem okay?

The complicating step at this point is that we override any existing 
"on_uninstall.m" file, so that if pkg uninstall is run as root, you get:

octave:1> pkg uninstall octcdf
error: Can not uninstall octcdf installed by the redhat package manager
error: called from:
error:   /usr/share/octave/packages/octcdf-1.1.1/packinfo/on_uninstall.m at 
line 2, column 3
error:   /usr/share/octave/3.3.54/m/pkg/pkg.m at line 985, column 7
error:   /usr/share/octave/3.3.54/m/pkg/pkg.m at line 365, column 7

This is done by moving the original on_uninstall.m out of the way on install, 
and back in place on uninstall, which is quite clumsy.  I'm wondering if there 
might be some other way to "lock" packages in place?  Could we develop some 
kind of a "dist.m" file perhaps that could get dropped into the packinfo 
directory to override?

Although, now that I look at the octave-forge repo, I don't see a single 
package that has an on_unistall.m file.  Could we reserve this for distro use?

Finally, when a user tries to remove and rpm install octave package, they get:

octave:3> pkg uninstall octcdf
warning: some of the packages you want to uninstall are not installed

which does not seem correct.

Thoughts?

--
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA/CoRA Division                    FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                  address@hidden
Boulder, CO 80301              http://www.cora.nwra.com