Re: There is an update to gl2ps available

[Ben Abbott]

On Sep 5, 2012, at 1:04 PM, Rik wrote:

> On 09/04/2012 08:20 PM, address@hidden wrote:
>> Message: 5
>> Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:29:49 -0700
>> From: Alexander Hansen <address@hidden>
>> To: Ben Abbott <address@hidden>
>> Cc: octave maintainers mailing list <address@hidden>
>> Subject: Re: There is an update to gl2ps available
>> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>> 
>> On 9/2/12 12:31 PM, Ben Abbott wrote:
>>>> The LIB_SUFFIX change made me wonder if gl2ps is now available via the 
>>>> various package managers.  I checked Fink and MacPorts on MacOSX.  It is 
>>>> not yet available for Fink (although that should be easy to do).  It is 
>>>> available from MacPorts.  I did a quick Google, it appears to be available 
>>>> for Debian.  Might we soon want to unbundle gl2ps and make it a dependency?
>>>> 
>>>> Ben
> 
> 9/5/12
> 
> Ben,
> 
> In fact, you filed an issue report about this back in December of 2011
> (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?35207).  One thing to do would be
> to use the natively installed gl2ps if it is available, and fall back to
> the one included with Octave if it is not.  We already do this for the fft
> function.  If FFTW is available we use it, otherwise we use FFTPACK in
> Fortran from cruft.
> 
> Are we going through a transition period with the packaging distributions
> and is gl2ps going to be available everywhere as a package in the future? 
> If so, I think we shouldn't bother with a transitional strategy in Octave. 
> Instead, we can continue to embed gl2ps for one more version of Octave and
> then just switch over to requiring it as an external dependency.  This is
> less work for us and since gl2ps doesn't seem to have appreciably changed
> much it's not like the version we're shipping with is lacking.
> 
> --Rik

Sounds like a good plan.

Ben