Re: Performance issues on Windows, suggests a MSVC build

[Thomas Weber]

Hi, 

time to join the discussion, I guess.

So, what's the problem with Octave or rather, why does it take so much
time to jump to 3.4 in Debian? The simple reason is that I don't have
much time anymore - let's say a few hours per week. 

*A lot* of that has gone into octave-forge packaging. I won't say much
about it, or this mail will become a rant. Let's just say that packages
with failing tests throughout the whole 3.2 cycle take the fun out of
packaging and that in my opinion the majority of octave-forge packages
is unmaintained. I just had a look: there are 32 packages which had
(sometimes multiple) releases in the last 12 months - we have about 100
packages in octave-forge.

And the only sane solution in my opinion is a good dose of "svn rm" on
the trunk. But somehow, people are reluctant to do that, because someone
somewhere sometime might have a use for this code.

There are some additional things that would be useful, like a "pkg test"
command or something, but this thread is so full of "would be nice to
have" that it's just not funny anymore. Bugs are not fixed by mails and
new functionality doesn't fall from trees.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:32:46AM -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 2011/6/27 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> > On 27-Jun-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> >
> > | Except building on Debian and Ubuntu is loads easier than building on
> > | Windows. We really lost some steam when Rafael Laboissiere retired
> > | from Debian packaging, but you and I regularly build on Debian, and we
> > | know it's not that bad.
> > |
> > | I'll work on the Debian packages this week, with some moderately
> > | high priority.
> >
> > I probably don't understand the issues involved in building binary
> > packages (for Windows, Debian, OS X, or any system) but it seems to me
> > that once set up, it should be fairly trivial to generate the next
> > one.  Can you briefly explain why this is not the case?

What do you do when a new Octave version comes out? Just build the new
one and remove the old one from wherever it was installed. Distributions
at least try to ensure a smooth upgrade path. 

> There's also the issue that Octave now properly handles sonames, i.e.
> we have a library to take care of now. 

Eh, no. I don't think that a soname of 0.0.0 is a sign of a properly
handled soname. This is not an issue in itself right now, but soname
handling isn't that easy - I can't tell you much about it due to lack of
knowledge on my part. But as I said, it doesn't matter much - it's a
non-issue right now.

        Thomas