octave under testing: big problem

[Andreas Goesele <Goesele@hfph.mwn.de>]

Hi!

I have an up to date debian testing install and I need to use octave.

But when I use a plot command together with legend, I get the follwing
warnings and errors:

warning: in graw near line 150, column 3:
warning: graw is deprecated and will be removed from a future
warning: version of Octave.
warning: You should use the higher-level plot functions
warning: ("plot", "mesh", "semilogx", etc.) instead
warning: of the low-level plotting commands.
warning: If you absolutely must use this function, use the
warning: internal version __gnuplot_raw__ instead.
error: invalid row index = 0
error: evaluating argument list element number 1
error: evaluating argument list element number 1
error: evaluating prefix operator `!' near line 190, column 7
error: if: error evaluating conditional expression
error: evaluating if command near line 190, column 3
error: called from `legend' in file
`/usr/share/octave/site/m/octave-forge/plot/legend.m'

The warnings I could live with, but the error is a real problem as it
means that I can't produce any longer legends with octave.

The error is obviously well known, but there are no plans to fix it:

   Problem comes from the system command. Sometimes, the command
   returns even if the sub-process has not yet answer.

   I don't know how to fix it. Try again...
   (http://www.octave.org/octave-lists/archive/help-octave.2004/msg02182.html)

   This is a long standing problem, which can easily be seen with the
   "ls" command where it doesn't return anything. I believe it is
   probably due to a compiler bug in the g++ I/O stuff, as when I
   looked at it I couldn't find anything within octave responsible for
   it. So maybe compiling with a newer version of g++ might also fix
   the issue....
   (http://www.octave.org/octave-lists/archive/help-octave.2004/msg02183.html)
   
I wasted my time by recompiling octave2.1 and octave-forge myself, but
the error remains.

One idea I had was to return to octave2.0 which I used under debian
stable, but octave-forge (and also octave-matcompat) where legend.m
resides depends on octave2.1.

Again, I *really* need octave and legend.m, and would hope to find a
solution to this. Any suggestion?

Andreas Gösele

-- 
Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur,
nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est.
                                      Augustinus, De doctrina christiana