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Re: Octave system-wide startup file



* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org> [2020-05-21 14:35]:

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?

Sounds good to me.

Thanks,

Rafael


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