Re: HDF5 library mismatch (switching to the maintainers list)

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 02/10/2011 06:00 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 10 February 2011 16:01, Przemek Klosowski<address@hidden>  wrote:
>
> > because Octave was compiled against HDF5 v.1.8.4 and in the meantime HDF was
> > updated because the dependency in the package is specificed loosely. The
> > abort is actually a preventive measure of the incompatibility testing code
> > in Octave; it's possible to disable the warning by controlling Octave with
> > an environment variable mentioned in the warning:
>
> Weren't we discussing in the maintainers mailing list how the Octave
> rpm packages need some love? Can you do any of that? Do you need help
> with it?

There are two issues here: packaging,  and the actual technical issue 
with HDF. As to the latter, which I believe is relevant to all 
distributions of Octave, the code implements a version check which on 
the surface appears to be overly strict: essentially it warns of the 
possibility of a crash and then proceeds to abort the program itself. 
There is an environment variable that avoids that abort, but it has to 
be set before starting Octave, so it's an usability issue.

I guess the thinking is that it's better to abort the program than to 
possibly return incorrect data. If people agree that this is the correct 
thing to do, I think we should change packaging so that Octave 
'requires' the version of HDF5 that it was built against. I think Fedora 
packaging system would trigger a rebuild of Octave in this case. Jussi 
Lehtola suggested a packaging fix in my bugzilla entry for this problem, 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=676707

Alternatively, from the usability point of view, I belive it would make 
sense to NOT abort octave, but issue the warning and either return 
nothing from the 'load' (overridable by a runtime configuration option), 
or proceed anyway (if we crash, we crash, and if the data is bad, well, 
there was a warning :).


About the general packaging issue, Octave RPM packages are managed by 
Jussi Lehtola, Alex Lan(?), mmahut (?) @Redhat and Rakesh Pandit. I try 
to help by submitting bugs: in bugzilla when it looks like a packaging 
issue, and to Octave's tracker otherwise. I wouldn't mind applying to 
become a co-packager for Octave, if people here felt that it would help.
Could you point me to the list of RPM packaging issues that need attention?