Re: Broken package octave-statistics 1.8.0

[Rafael Laboissière <rafael@debian.org>]

* Rafael Laboissière <rafael@debian.org> [2025-12-03 15:44]:
> * Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org> [2025-12-03 14:11]:
>
> > Le mercredi 03 décembre 2025 à 12:46 +0100, Rafael Laboissière a 
> > écrit :
> > > I have uploaded a broken version (1.8.0-1) of the octave-statistics
> > > package to unstable. It included the nonexistent package octave-datatypes
> > > as a dependency. This has been automatically added to the Depends field
> > > by dh_octave_substvar via the substitution variable ${octave:Depends}.
> > >
> > > I apologize for the confusion.
> > >
> > > I do know how to proceed now. In the long term, we need to package 
> > > octave-datatypes for Debian. I have already created a Git 
> > > repository for it at Salsa, but it is still empty (waiting for a 
> > > push on my side).
> > >
> > > In the short term, we could upload a new version (1.8.0-2) without 
> > > the dependency on octave-datatypes. I do not know this will impact 
> > > the usability of the package. Interestingly, all of the 11,058 
> > > unit tests succeed in the absence of the datatypes package.
> > >
> > > What do you think?
> >
> > If the “usual” functionality of octave-statistics works in 1.8.0 
> > without octave-datatypes (meaning that the latter is only used for 
> > by a handful of new functions), then dropping the dependency for the 
> > time being seems the easiest solution.
> >
> > Otherwise, reuploading 1.7.7 under a version number such as 1.8.0- 
> > 1+really1.7.7-1 is another possibility.
>
> I am leaning toward the first solution. We could also file an RC bug 
> report against the octave-statistics package to prevent it from 
> entering testing. Would this be ok?

I investigated the issue further. The list of functions 
introduced by the datatypes package is as follows:

    array2table
    caldays
    calendarDuration
    calmonths
    calquarters
    calweeks
    calyears
    categorical
    cell2table
    convertCharsToStrings
    convertStringsToChars
    csv2table
    datetime
    days
    duration
    hours
    iscalendarduration
    iscategorical
    isdatetime
    isduration
    istable
    milliseconds
    minutes
    missing
    NaT
    seconds
    string
    struct2table
    table
    vartype
    years

Apparently, none of them are used in the statistics package.

I will release version 1.8.0-2 of the octave-statistics package, which 
will no longer depend on octave-datatypes.

Best,

Rafael Laboissière