[Pkg-octave-devel] Dynare: git, matlab, testsuite
Hi everyone,
First, I'm glad to see that Dynare has now entered unstable. Thanks
for your help in making this possible.
I'd like to discuss a few points for the future developments:
1) Should the dynare/debian repository be migrated to git? I'm not
familiar with git, so I don't feel a strong urge to migrate. But if
you definitely consider it as a goal, I will take the necessary steps.
2) My next immediate objective would be to facilitate things for
Matlab users (which currently consist a large part of our user base,
even though we are advocating the use of Octave, in particular for
academics and students).
Note that the package which is actually in unstable works under
Matlab: even though some parts of Dynare are implementd in MEX files,
we provide alternative M-files which implement the same
functionnality. So without MEX files, Dynare runs, but is slower.
The goal is therefore to provide compiled MEX files for Matlab. We
obviously can't ship the binaries with Debian. So my idea is to create
a dynare-matlab package (depending on the main dynare package), which
would:
* install the MEX sources in /usr/src/dynare
* ask the user the location of Matlab on his drive, via debconf
* compile and install the MEX files in the postinst script
* delete the MEX files in the postrm script
I suppose that this dynare-matlab package would have to go into contrib.
Do you have any suggestion/objection to this?
3) Concerning the testsuite, and to answer Thomas' question, some of
the very long tests are useless in the sense that we could test the
same functionnality with shorter tests. We have to work a little bit
on that upstream. But incorporating a testsuite in the Dynare Debian
package definitely remains my objective, which could be reached quite
soon.
All the best,
--
Sébastien Villemot
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