Re: octave-forge dependency?

[Tony Richardson <ar63 at evansville dot edu>]

Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha <at> cs.nyu.edu> writes:

> 
> On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Tony Richardson wrote:
> 
> > I often use octave and do no plotting at all.  Octave starts and runs
> > fine if gnuplot isn't installed.  (It complains about not being able
> > to find gnuplot when the plot command is used.)  Should there really
> > be a dependency if only a subset of features requires a package?
> >
> > I'd prefer to see gnuplot removed from the octave dependency list.
> > Of course then you'd have to deal with all the posts saying that
> > the plot command in octave is broken.  So I don't know what the best
> > approach would be.  How do others feel?
> 
> Actually, a viable solution for this was already proposed by John W Eaton
> in <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-12/msg00283.html>.  Since octave adds
> other directories to the path before it runs, it's possible to create a
> gnuplot wrapper that uses the real gnuplot if present and exits with a
> reasonable error message otherwise.
> 
> Just to clarify, the reason I thought it was a hack was that it was an
> *octave-forge* script dealing with a *gnuplot* bug.  I don't think the
> mechanism itself is in any way hacky.
> 	Igor

I don't follow.  I'm asking for the gnuplot requirement for octave to be
dropped from setup.ini so that when I install octave all of the X11
stuff (through a gnuplot dependency) isn't installed by default.
It's not that I can't work around the problem, I can.  Perhaps a better
way to handle it, as you suggested in another message regarding tetex-bin,
is to add a comment in the README about installing cygwin/X11/gnuplot
and/or setting up Windows-native gnuplot if you want to do plotting
with octave.

Tony

I can.  The 





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