Carnë Draug wrote:
On 11 March 2012 17:00, Philip Nienhuis<pr.nienhuis@hccnet.nl> wrote:Sébastien Villemot wrote:the dependency is not enforced on Debian. We should probably change that in the future.I'd conclude that situation can only mean that I underestimated the need out there for JSON/PCH/fexist functionality....Another conclusion, much more negative, is that there's many users who installed the io package and, unable to use it, gave up
Maybe. But if the xlsopen/odsopen scripts cannot find supporting system SW (ActiveX or Java) they clearly say so. That should ring a bell.
But perhaps I could add better messages (there's still time before io-1.0.18):
- (Windows only) if no ActiveX/COM found: "Apparently no MS-Excel installed, trying to fall back to Java"
- If no Java is found: "No Java JRE or JDK detected - essential for spreadsheet support"
- If Java was detected but no Octave-Java support was found: "Have you installed AND loaded the Java package?"
OTOH, if people want to use fairly complex programs like Octave, I think it is reasonable to expect them to have a significantly higher level of computer literacy than people who only use e-mail, text processing and web browsers.
(of octave or
spreadsheet --- hopefully the later) instead of fixing it by installing the java package.
Perhaps it would help if the dependencies could be made platform-specific: - Windows pkg OR Java pkg on Windows - Java pkg on all other platforms but currently that is not supported by Octave (-Forge). Philip