Re: Octave Stable PPA Updated

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 08:13:24 +0100, Colin Macdonald wrote:
> On 22/08/15 22:52, Mike Miller wrote:
> > Octave 4.0.0 is now in the development release of Ubuntu (15.10), so
> > I've now updated the PPA with backports of 4.0.0 to all releases of
> > Ubuntu.
> 
> First of all: thanks!  I use this on the Travis continuous integration
> service and it works great with one project (octave-doctest).
> 
> Unfortunately, on another (octave-symbolic) I get "panic: Illegal
> instruction -- stopping myself...", I think on matrix exponential, but
> maybe other commands too.
> 
> This is on precise (12.04?).  These are virtual machines somewhere so I
> don't have direct shell access to debug easily.
> 
> Older posts about this error suggest BLAS mismatches...

Thanks Colin. Thanks to several other emails from other Travis users
I've seen over the last few days, it seems likely that OpenBLAS in 12.04
is a very old version and is not expected to work very well.

Octave 4.0.0 added a Recommends on libopenblas-base, I should clearly
remove that for the backport to 12.04. There will be a new build
forthcoming in the PPA. In the meantime, you can blacklist or simply
uninstall libopenblas-base after octave is installed.

If you would like to help test something for me, can you try installing
the `libatlas3gf-base` package on the same install command as octave?
That should satisfy the OR-dependency and ATLAS should work fine.

> BTW, from looking at the [files
> available](http://ppa.launchpad.net/octave/stable/ubuntu/pool/main/o/octave/),
> I don't see any easy way to keep running 3.8.

Correct. The files are there, but when the Packages file is compiled
only the newest version of a given package name is added to the
metadata. I think the only way to do that would be to maintain a
separate PPA for an “oldstable” version, something I'm not really
interested in taking on.

-- 
mike