Octave print() incompatible with gnuplot5

[Vertago1]

After updating to 16.04 some of my octave scripts broke because they use gnuplot to print and the default has become gnuplot5 which has compatibility problems with octave. This is a known problem upstream, see:
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?42838

I found a workaround (if gnuplot4 is installed):
sudo update-alternatives --set gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot4-x11

This sets the gnuplot symbolic link to point to gnuplot4 instead of gnuplot5 system wide which isn't ideal in the scenario someone needs to use gnuplot5 elsewhere. I checked for a way to configure the gnuplot path for octave but didn't see anything immediately obvious. Maybe I missed something.

I suppose changing the PATH variable for octave might be a workable patch. I figure this but probably won't get fixed before the release, but I wanted to post it so anyone who runs into the problem will see the work around.

[Mike Miller (mtmiller)]

Thanks for the detailed bug report. As you noticed, this is upstream bug #42838, and is fixed in the upstream release 4.0.1. Merging the 4.0.1 release (which is already in Debian testing) into the Ubuntu archive will fix this bug.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

Uploaded a few seconds ago in yakkety