Hi,
I’ve just made an upload of Octave that, among other things, changes
the setup for the system-wide initialization file.
At startup, Octave reads four files:
— /usr/share/octave/site/m/startup/octaverc (site-specific)
— /usr/share/octave/${VERSION}/m/startup/octaverc (version-specific)
— ~/.octaverc
— ./.octaverc
Previously, the version-specific startup file was a symlink to
/etc/octave.conf.
The problem however was that the /etc/octave.conf we provided was
regularly out-of-sync with the version-specific octaverc provided by
upstream, to which new features are sometimes added.
My understanding is actually that the version-specific file is not
really meant to be locally modified.
So, with the latest upload, the version-specific file is no longer a
symlink, it is simply the one provided by upstream. It’s now the site-
specific file which is a symlink to /etc/octave.conf (the site-specific
file provided by upstream is empty, which shows that customizations are
rather meant for this one).
Consequently, /etc/octave.conf by default only contains Debian
customizations (i.e. it currently installs the “missing” handler that
says to install liboctave-dev or octave-doc when relevant).
I hope you are ok with this change.
Given that we have already made a change to this setup, I’m now
wondering whether we should go a little further: why not renaming
/etc/octave.conf to /etc/octaverc? That naming would be more consistent
with upstream naming. This will impose a manual intervention on people
who have made local modifications to /etc/octave.conf, but they are in
any case forced to do so because of the above change.
What do you think?
Best,
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Sébastien Villemot
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://sebastien.villemot.name
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ https://www.debian.org
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part