Re: [octave:package-releases] #43 msh-1.0.7

[c.]

On 4 Jul 2013, at 20:03, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:

> They won't discard it, they would just make it a dependency.

Not really, my worries are due to something that happened in the past.

There is (or at least there was in the past) a packaging
bug that prevented gmsh and octave to be installed at the same time
on debian. As a result they stopped packaging msh because they saw
the warning about missing gmsh binary when installing msh, even
though it was just a warning and it clearly stated that the package 
would be still usable.

So as supporting debian is important to me and the debian packagers 
seem to be really sensitive to what is a dependency, I'd like to make 
it very clear that this dependency is optional.

So that in case there is any conflict between the fenics and Octave packages
msh does not get thrown out again.

> You can
> leave a note on the DESCRIPTION file saying that it's optional but
> that would solve nothing. Would you rather have them distributing a
> half-working binary?

The msh package is fully functional even without dolfin so YES, I would like
msh to be distributed even for systems where fenics is not available, but NO,
I wouldn't call it a "half-working binary".

This is the whole purpose of the configure tests in the msh package, if
dolfin is not available then invoking a function that depends on dolfin will
issue an error and die gracefully, just like it is done in Octave when
an optional package, e.g. arpack/eigs, is missing.

> It needs the dolfin library to work. 

No, it doesn't. that's my point. It will take advantage of it if present, 
but will work fine if not. That's my definition of "optional".

c.