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Re: [Pkg-octave-devel] Adding an Octave-dependent software into Debian



"Rafael Laboissiere" <rafael@debian.org> a écrit :

* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien.villemot@ens.fr> [2009-02-23 11:44]:

Basically Dynare consists of three parts:
- a preprocessor (written in C++) which parses a text file containing
the model description, and dumps Octave/Matlab intermediary files
- a collection of Octave/Matlab routines
- a few dynamically loadable libraries (DLL), called from
Octave/Matlab, for time-critical algorithms

Historically Dynare has been developed and used under Matlab. With a
few minor changes we made it run under GNU Octave 3.0 (although a few
features are still problematic).

I would like to make Dynare enter the official Debian project. I have
already created a Debian package for the latest stable version of
Dynare (see http://www.dynare.org/DynareWiki/InstallOnDebianOrUbuntu).
However note that my packaging is probably not suitable for direct
entry into Debian, because it creates both Octave and Matlab DLLs, the
latter being obviously not desirable for a Debian package.

I have ideas on how to improve the packaging, and of course I would be
willing to do the necessary work for creating a 100% policy-compliant
package.

Do you think that I should open a RFP bug? Do you know of anyone who
would be willing to become a sponsor for this?

Since Dynare is so tightly related to Octave, you could join the DOG (Debian
Octave Group) and add your initial packaging work to our SVN repository.
that way, we could work in a collaborative way towards integrating Dynare
into Debian.

At any rate, a ITP bug should be filled for the package.

Thanks for your answer.

This sounds good, I would be glad to join the DOG. I'm going to read the development guidelines and other related material.

One question by the way:

As I told you, my current packaging builds MEX files for Matlab. This is not desirable nor feasible for an official Debian package, because of Matlab's license and also because autobuilding of the MEX files requires Matlab, which is not an option for Debian buildd.

However, since most current Dynare users run it under Matlab, I would like to provide a user-friendly procedure for them. Basically two things need to be done for Matlab users: remove some GCC 4.1 libraries shipped with Matlab (which create problems with Dynare C++ preprocessor when it is compiled with GCC 4.3), and recompile the MEX files. This could be done either (1) through a debconf helper, or (2) by providing a dedicated script (for example in /usr/share/doc) to be run by the user.

Have you any objection to this?

Best,

Sébastien Villemot



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