Thanks a lot for your help
I am not so strong in programming: how should I apply your patch?
My message was mainly ment for Sébastien Villemot (or other maintainers of the Octave package in Debian).
But you could also build Octave from source. For that, download
the tarball, apply the patch, run `autoreconf -fi` and then build
as usual.
Build instructions are on the Wiki: Octave
for Debian systems - Octave (Unfortunately, the server that
hosts Octave's web pages seems to be under a DoS attack recently.
So, the Wiki might not be reachable.)
I hope that helps.
Markus