Re: Question to Debian Etch users: Has someone managed to install the Octave-forge package for Octave 2.9

[Thomas Weber]

Hi, 

Am Samstag, den 01.03.2008, 22:08 -0600 schrieb Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> On 01/03/2008, Stefan Pofahl <address@hidden> wrote:
> The Debian recommendation for using newer software in the stable
> distribution is to use *backports*.
> 
>      http://backports.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
> 
> There doesn't seem to be a backport of Octave 3.0 yet, but instead of
> recommending users of Debian stable to move to testing, we should
> backport Octave 3.0 instead. It's not that difficult; it might be as
> simple as "apt-get source -b octave3.0" inside etch. No need to
> introduce bugs to potentially all of Debian when we only want one
> piece of newer software.

Jordi, will you please, pretty please, stop spreading that word!

It is *not* possible to simply recompile the octave3.0 packages in
Debian. I don't even need to look at it; the fact that the sparse
libraries were renamed is already sufficient.

Even then, backports.org has a policy: that includes only backporting
packages that *are* in testing.

The correct solution to Stefan's problem is called "chroot". I already
explained in a private mail to him how to set this up. Only a few
commands for him *and* bug reports are actually simply reprocducible
(contrary to his current setup which is a mixture of stable, testing and
unstable).

Backports for Octave packages are out of the question. The inclusion of
octave-forge package will increase our package load by a *factor* of 5.
Sorry, but we have a life besides packaging stuff.

        Thomas