Ubuntu
octave package

octave-nox package

Bug #1706596 reported by atcl on 2017-07-26

This bug affects 2 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	octave (Debian)	New	Unknown	debbugs #741097
	octave (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

As suggested in https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/octave/+question/653511 I am filing a bug for the requested octave-nox package.

A no-X octave package (compiled without the GUI) is advantageous on headless compute servers, super computers and containers as it does not require numerous (yet unnecessary) X and GUI dependencies.

Thanks

Revision history for this message

Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote on 2017-07-26:

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in octave (Ubuntu):
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Mike Miller (mtmiller) wrote on 2017-07-26:

This has been reported to Debian as a feature request a while ago. Please refer to https://bugs.debian.org/741097 for the original bug report and discussion.

The bug is still open, but so far it appears that the Debian Octave packaging team is unlikely to put in the effort to create an octave-nox package.

In particular, please note that Octave has had a dependency on OpenGL for plotting since 2008. This dependency has nothing to do with whether Octave's GUI is being used or not.

Also note that Octave is built with support for loading Java libraries, which adds a dependency on the JRE.

Building Octave without the Qt GUI would save about 30 MB of storage due to Qt dependencies.

Building Octave without support for Java would save about 100 MB of storage due to Java dependencies.

You would also have to build Octave without any support for OpenGL plotting and without any support for image file I/O (imread, imwrite, etc) to allow it to be installed without any X11 libraries at all.

If this feature is important to you, you might want to try modifying the source package yourself and see what tradeoffs you can make and see whether it's actually worth the savings from fewer dependencies.

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2017-07-26

Changed in octave (Debian):
status:	Unknown → New

Revision history for this message

atcl (atcl) wrote on 2017-07-27:

These are very good points. Practically this would mean the following variables should be set during configuration:

--without-opengl
--without-qt
--without-fltk
--disable-java

I would be fine with dropping java, yet the dependency is "default-jre-headless". If java gets additionally removed maybe the proposed package name should change to octave-minimal?

BTW: would plotting directly to files still work via "gnuplot-nox" and no X11? Or would the "libcairo" dependency of gnuplot impede this as it has an X11 dependency?