* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org> [2012-12-01 19:45]:
Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@laboissiere.net> writes:In the thread in help-octave, Juan Pablo pointed out that the command "mkoctfile" fails when liboctave-dev is not installed. I think that /usr/share/octave/<version>/m/miscellaneous/mkoctfile.m should be moved from octave-common into liboctave-dev, at least for now.Or maybe better, we could patch it so that it tells to install liboctave-dev if /usr/bin/mkoctfile is not found. What do you think?
Yes, this is a possible solution. The drawback is the maintenance burden, since we will have to keep in sync with upstream. Also, notice that if we only patch the code, the command "help mkoctfile" will give misleading information, making the user believe that the function is available in the system.
Another (much more tortuous) solution would be to create a placeholder mkoctifle.m in octave-common and make liboctave-dev dpkg-divert it to the real one.
Rafael