Re: Which version of Octave?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 09:49:22PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 24-Mar-2004, Joe Koski <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> | Since octave and octave-forge are moving targets, keeping a Mac installer
> | current would be a continuing problem.
> 
> Dirk Eddelbuettel faces the same problem for the Debian packages, yet
> seems to manage quite well.  I think he now has a nice set of scripts
> that make packaging relatively easy.  Perhaps he would be willing to

"Standing on the shoulders of giants", as they say.  The Debian build system
is quite mature, and my years of maintaining Octave have lead to a fairly
well-tuned setup. Plus, the compliment goes back to John for impeccable
release quality. It builds just about each time, and if not, he has a patch
ready within hours.

That said, all this doesn't guarantee success. Case in point is that 2.1.57
just moved into testing, yet octave-forge is well behind because a) m68k is
behind and b) escalating dependencies implied by qhull: see the useful cgi
scrip 'why is X not in testing yet' at 

        http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=octave-forge 

I have now tied the Depends of octave-forge much more closely to the version
of Octave it was built with. Going forward, octave will only move to testing
when octave-forge is ready too. But that may be too radical for
non-octave-forge users of Octave. We'll see.

> say what the time requirements are for him now, and how much effort it
> was to get the scripts in shape to make tracking new snapshots
> somewhat less of a burden.

There is no secret. Follow the list, download new versions when they become
available, build and upload them. 
> 
> | I've been using Octave less than a year, and have used versions
> | numbered all the way from 2.1.36 to 2.1.50, and am currently looking
> | into 2.1.57.
> 
> Is that a problem?  You do want progress, don't you?  For a long time,
> we had the opposite problem, of nearly stalled development.  I think
> I know which situation most users of Octave would prefer.  The
> "development" vs. "testing" designations for snapshots is a way to
> address the issue of constant upgrades.  Eventually, we will have
> another stable release, but probably not for a while.

Also, you are your own admin on your box. If you like a given version,
nobody forces you to upgrade. We only give you more choices, it is up to you
to employ them in the best way given your needs and circumstances.

Dirk

-- 
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