crashes with octave3.2 when $HOME/.octave_hist is not writable

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Oct-2009, Soeren Sonnenburg wrote:

| To reproduce do e.g:
| 
| $ export HOME=/
| $ echo version | octave
| GNU Octave, version 3.2.3
| Copyright (C) 2009 John W. Eaton and others.
| This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.
| There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
| FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  For details, type `warranty'.
| 
| Octave was configured for "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".
| 
| Additional information about Octave is available at
| http://www.octave.org.
| 
| Please contribute if you find this software useful.
| For more information, visit http://www.octave.org/help-wanted.html
| 
| Report bugs to <address@hidden> (but first, please read
| http://www.octave.org/bugs.html to learn how to write a helpful report).
| 
| For information about changes from previous versions, type `news'.
| 
| ans = 3.2.3
| error: Permission denied
| terminate called after throwing an instance of
| 'octave_execution_exception'
| panic: Aborted -- stopping myself...
| attempting to save variables to `octave-core'...
| warning: unable to open `octave-core' for writing...
| Aborted
| 
| Das ging aber noch mit octave 3.0.x
| 
| $ echo version | octave3.0
| GNU Octave, version 3.0.5
| Copyright (C) 2008 John W. Eaton and others.
| This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.
| There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
| FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  For details, type `warranty'.
| 
| Octave was configured for "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".
| 
| Additional information about Octave is available at
| http://www.octave.org.
| 
| Please contribute if you find this software useful.
| For more information, visit http://www.octave.org/help-wanted.html
| 
| Report bugs to <address@hidden> (but first, please read
| http://www.octave.org/bugs.html to learn how to write a helpful report).
| 
| For information about changes from previous versions, type `news'.
| 
| ans = 3.0.5
| error: Permission denied

You are getting this message when Octave tries to write the history
file and it fails because of permission problems.  I already fixed the
problem the development sources.  Now I see this:

  $ HOME=/ /usr/local/octave/devel/bin/octave
  GNU Octave, version 3.3.50+
  Copyright (C) 2009 John W. Eaton and others.
  This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.
  There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  For details, type `warranty'.

  Octave was configured for "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu".

  Additional information about Octave is available at http://www.octave.org.

  Please contribute if you find this software useful.
  For more information, visit http://www.octave.org/help-wanted.html

  Report bugs to <address@hidden> (but first, please read
  http://www.octave.org/bugs.html to learn how to write a helpful report).

  For information about changes from previous versions, type `news'.

  octave:1> quit

  error: Permission denied
  error: ignoring octave_execution_exception while preparing to exit


Please report bugs to the address@hidden list, not the help list.

Thanks,

jwe