Re: There is an update to gl2ps available

[Rik]

On 09/04/2012 08:20 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:29:49 -0700
> From: Alexander Hansen <address@hidden>
> To: Ben Abbott <address@hidden>
> Cc: octave maintainers mailing list <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: There is an update to gl2ps available
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 9/2/12 12:31 PM, Ben Abbott wrote:
>> > The LIB_SUFFIX change made me wonder if gl2ps is now available via the 
>> > various package managers.  I checked Fink and MacPorts on MacOSX.  It is 
>> > not yet available for Fink (although that should be easy to do).  It is 
>> > available from MacPorts.  I did a quick Google, it appears to be available 
>> > for Debian.  Might we soon want to unbundle gl2ps and make it a dependency?
>> > 
>> > Ben
>> > 
9/5/12

Ben,

In fact, you filed an issue report about this back in December of 2011
(https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?35207).  One thing to do would be
to use the natively installed gl2ps if it is available, and fall back to
the one included with Octave if it is not.  We already do this for the fft
function.  If FFTW is available we use it, otherwise we use FFTPACK in
Fortran from cruft.

Are we going through a transition period with the packaging distributions
and is gl2ps going to be available everywhere as a package in the future? 
If so, I think we shouldn't bother with a transitional strategy in Octave. 
Instead, we can continue to embed gl2ps for one more version of Octave and
then just switch over to requiring it as an external dependency.  This is
less work for us and since gl2ps doesn't seem to have appreciably changed
much it's not like the version we're shipping with is lacking.

--Rik
> It's in Fink now.