Recently a Cygwin octave user requested emacs support for octave, along the lines of the Debian octave-emacsen package. I've been investigating this. The author of octave (John Ewing), pointed out that the most important three files in the Debian octave-emacsen package, comprising the lisp support, are _already_ in the file manifest of emacs on cygwin. So there doesn't seem to be much need for a Debian-like octave-emacsen package on cygwin.
Besides the lisp support, the Debian octave-emacsen package also contains a shell script called "otags", which installs in /usr/bin, and uses /usr/bin/etags (part of the emacs package) to generate octave "tags" for octave functions, from their m-file source. The source for otags, and a man page, are supplied in the octave source tree. This could be installed with octave, but it wouldn't work without a functioning etags program. Or it could be made into a very small octave-otags package, requiring emacs to be installed. octave-otags wouldn't even have to compile, since it only contains shell script and man page. Does it make sense to package something like this separately from octave? If so, 1) what is the packaging protocol for something that doesn't require compilation; 2) How would one express an "or" condition in the setup.hint, as in requires emacs or emacs-x11? Thanks, Jim Phillips
