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[Pkg-octave-devel] Matlab-Octave compatibility issue in future-Debian package



Hi,

[ Please keep me CC'ed as I'm not subscribed to the list. ]

I'm the maintainer of a to-become-official Debian package of FSL. This
is one of the major fMRI data analysis tools. See the following links
for more information (first is upstream homepage, second is package
homepage):

http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/
http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/fsl


The FSL sources contain some matlab functions for data import and export. 
But as Debian is about free software I wanted to check whether those
function work with Octave as well. 

As it turns out, they do except for two calls to eval() in 'read_avw.m'.
Those calls shall run a script that uses some FSL tools to convert a
dataset into the required format. As it seems, Octave doesn't like that
very much. But, if I change eval() to system() everything works fine.

I'm not familiar with Matlab (as I mostly use R). So my question is: Do
you know a way to patch those function, that the resulting code works
with Octave *and* Matlab? Is system() available in Matlab too? Are system()
and eval() equivalent for this purpose?

I have to support Matlab, because most people that use FSL will most
likely have Matlab installed. On the other side, I want to encourage
people to use free software alternatives. As I see it, the only way to
do this, is to make things easy (at least for idealistic scientists).

I attached the whole matlab stuff.


Thanks in advance.

Michael



PS: I've sent the message a few days ago, but neither got any replies, nor
could I find it in the list archive. Sorry, if you recieved this message
twice.


-- 
GPG key:  1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke
ICQ: 48230050

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