can't install octcdf-1.0.13 package

[Thomas Detman]

I love octave!

I just upgraded my Lenovo T61 Linux notebook from Ubuntu 8.04LTS to 10.04LTS.
I had installed octave with the Synaptic Package Manager under 8.04.  The 
upgrade automatically tried to upgrade my octave to octave-3.2.3 in the process, 
but failed with error message ~ "subprocess installed post-installation script 
returned error exit".
...
Package octave-3.2 failed to install or upgrade.  I clicked [report to 
developers].

After rebooting into Ubuntu 10.04, I still had octave-3.0.

I may have messed things up long ago.  I originally had octave-2.9, and with it 
the package octcdf-1.0.7, and it worked.  But to get around a graphics bug in 
2.9, I had downloaded and installed separately octave-3.0.  I tried but failed 
to install the octcdf package into my octave-3.0.  So I kept and used both.
(I'm only 90% sure of those version numbers.)

After the OS upgrade, I used Synaptic to upgrade octave to 3.2.3, and that 
succeeded.  But when I tried to install the octcdf-1.0.13 package with Synaptic, 
I ran into problems.  Synaptic seemed to be successful, but when I ran octave, 
it told me the octcdf package was not installed (pkg list).

I used Synaptic to see what files it installed, and looked at some of the new 
"tree" branches; they were there.

I tried several things with the pkg command, but got nowhere.

I think my octave-3.2.3 file tree or configuration must be messed up, but I 
don't really know what's wrong or how to fix it.  (Help)

I suppose I could download the octcdf-1.0.13.tar.gz package and use pkg install 
to try to install it that way; that might work, but it is a work around and does 
not fix the underlying configuration(?) problem.

Thanks,
Thomas