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Re: [Pkg-octave-devel] Python script in latest miscellaneous package



* Thomas Weber <tweber@debian.org> [2014-06-09 19:47]:

On Mon, Jun 09, 2014 at 04:24:43PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
Le lundi 09 juin 2014 à 16:05 +0200, Thomas Weber a écrit :

miscellaneous 1.2.1 include a python script (inst/physical_constant.py) for downloading and converting physical constants from the NIST website. Right now, the script ends up in the installation directory. Should we move it into /usr/bin (or whatever the correct path for python scripts is)? On the one hand, this seems to be correct, on the other hand, I don't want the added overhead of dealing with the Debian Python policy.

Is this python script launched from an Octave function/script, or directly by the user from a shell? If this is the former, then leaving it in the installation directory is the right thing to do. If this is the latter, then /usr/bin is the path mandated by the FHS (and therefore the Debian Policy).

AFAIK, it is not used at all in the released package, neither by a script nor by the user during normal usage. One can use the script to obtain updated values from NIST; but it is not clear to me if this is indeed the intended use. In other words, physical_constants.m is generated via physical_constants.py, when the latter is called by the user.

It seems that physical_constants.py is only useful at upstream-tarball building time. In this case, I would completely remove it from the binary package or, at best, put it in /usr/share/doc. It is true that users might have a need for it, but how often is the NIST database updated?

Rafael






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