Re: octave-forge dependency?

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Tony Richardson wrote:

> 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.

You were also asking what the best approach would be to avoid the
complaints that octave is broken once that dependency is removed.  That's
what my post was trying to address.  FWIW, I agree that if it's possible
to avoid the dependency, it should be done.

> 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.

The message I quoted was a solution for the package maintainer, not for
the users (though it's possible for the users to employ it as well).
IMO, it's not enough to just mention this in the README if things are
going to break -- my suggestion was only meant for things like harmless
warnings.
	Igor
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