Re: very small packages - merge into general/miscelleneous or move into core

[Thomas Weber]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 04:46:45PM +0100, c. wrote:
> 
> On 23 Jan 2014, at 13:34, Thomas Weber <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> >> That's why I whish Debian packagers would let pkg.m work 
> >> so Octave users could just decide for themselves.
> > 
> > We share that wish. Have you a fix for 
> > http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32049 ?
> 
> I'm not sure this is exactly the same, but is this problem related to the one 
> discussed here?
> 
> http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Ubuntu-12-04-pkg-install-does-not-work-tp4657080p4657093.html
> 
> If I compile Octave myself on ubuntu without applying that change pkg.m works 
> as expected.

Yes, the issue is shortly described. Once you have set the prefix in
pkg, you cannot change it anymore as it is a persistent variable in
pkg.m (and this overrides the -local switch). We need to set it however
once to tell Octave where the system packages are. 

If my memory serves correctly, Octave used to include its own version
number in the packages' path, which was the main problem - an update
from say 3.6.3 to 3.6.4 would mean that Octave would not find the
installed packages anymore with the default settings. 
I don't have time right now, but maybe with the refactored pkg.m we
might be able to overcome this by patching pkg.m directly (which we have
avoided in the past). 

        Thomas