Re: [Pkg-octave-devel] Request to Join Project Debian Octave Group from Oliver Heimlich (oheim-guest)

[Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@laboissiere.net>]

Oliver,

I am moving this discussion into our mailing list pkg-octave-devel.  I 
hope that this is okay with you.

[For the mailing list subscribers: this discussion regards the 
packaging of the Octave-Forge package called " interval".  Oliver 
Heimlich just joined the DOG at Alioth.]

* Oliver Heimlich <oheim@posteo.de> [2015-09-27 13:26]:

> On 26.09.2015 11:55, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> > I pushed my original files.  Please change d/check.m and d/copyright as 
> > you see fit.
>
> I have updated the package to the upstream version 1.1.0 and fixed some 
> things like building the manual, copyright information, and verification.
>
> The manual builds fine, except the 3D graphics are created with gnuplot 
> and look strange, because z-buffers are wrong.

Good.  I added the necessary build-dependencies on imagemagick and 
gnuplot-nox (see below).

> I have also added a “Recommend” from the arch-indep package to the 
> “octave-interval” package.

This is an interesting change.  We have already two instances of this 
scheme in packages maintained by the DOG: octave-communications-common 
and octave-ltfat-common.  Should we make them recommend, viz., 
octave-communications and octave-ltfat?

> I have one problem with the Build-Depends: I do not have octave-pkg-dev 
> (>> 1.2.0).

You should preferably test the final building of your packages in an 
Debian unstable system.  Even better: you should use pbuilder in order to 
ensure that the package builds correctly in a clean unstable environment.

BTW, this is how I found the lacking build-dependencies on imagemagick 
and gnuplot-nox.

> I get the following errors, which are fixed in the next 
> octave-pkg-dev?
>
>   E: octave-interval: bad-provided-package-name octave-Octave
>   E: octave-interval-common: bad-provided-package-name octave-Octave

> However, I plan to fix this upstream with the next release.

This is a very strange error and I am not sure it is caused by an 
outdated version of octave-pkg-dev.  At any rate, I could not get that 
far, because the building here failed with this error message:

   /path/to/octave-interval/octave-interval/doc/manual.t2d/pdf/xtr/manual.texinfo:8: Internal error, already defined: 00A0.
   \DeclareUnicodeCharacter ..., already defined: #1}
                                                     \fi \expandafter \globalle...
   l.8 \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{00A0}{\ }

Rafael