Octave needs to depend on gcc minor version number

[MacPorts@…]

For details, see ​https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?41520

The upshot is that Octave needs to depend explicitly on the minor version number of gcc so that octave gets rebuilt when upgrading from gcc 5.3 to 5.4, etc. The reason is that mkoctfile depends on a directory that has the minor version in its name, and there seems to be no mechanism for generalizing this. The symptom is that Octave's pkg command does not work for installing things like the control package from Octave forge.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

In the future, please Cc the port maintainers (port info --maintainers octave), if any.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to MacPorts@…:

For details, see ​https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?41520

The upshot is that Octave needs to depend explicitly on the minor version number of gcc so that octave gets rebuilt when upgrading from gcc 5.3 to 5.4, etc.

MacPorts does not have the capability to declare a dependency on a version of a port, only on a port as a whole. If octave requires this, then the developer of octave-devel would have to manually increase its revision whenever a new version of gcc is released. octave-devel has variants for gcc5, gcc6 and gcc7, and since the developer of octave-devel does not know which of those variants the user has chosen, presumably this means the developer of octave-devel would need to increase its revision whenever a new version of either gcc5 or gcc6 or gcc7 is released. If snapshots count as new versions, then new versions of gcc7 are released every week. So this is really not a reasonable situation, and it is not reasonable for octave to care about the minor revision of the compiler. The developers of octave should fix this.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Or possibly, the fact that the version number appears in the directory name is an error in the way we are packaging gcc at MacPorts. If so, maybe someone can suggest what change we should make to the gcc packaging to avoid this.

If gcc's build system is putting its files into versioned directories by default, and this is causing problems for octave, then maybe this is a problem that needs to be taken up with the developers of gcc.

[Marcus Calhoun-Lopez <marcuscalhounlopez@…>]

In aec14792b8457e3c77b5c90a3c402a88ba9eb41b/macports-ports (master):

octave: update version 4.2.2->4.4.0

Fixes #56480
Fixes #51707

See ​https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/1827
for all of the initial work on this issue