Package: octave-statistics
Version: 1.4.0-4
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
I'm a long-time user of Matlab. One of the things that's always
annoyed me is that they put so many functions into toolkits that cost
extra. I've appreciated that Octave made the statistics functions
available with no extra effort. So I was disappointed by this:
octave:1> help chi2inv
error: help: 'chi2inv' not found
...even after I had installed the octave-statistics package, which
does include that function:
$dpkg -L octave-statistics | grep chi2inv
/usr/share/octave/packages/statistics-1.4.0/distributions/chi2inv.m
I'm also a long-time user of Debian, so I checked in
/usr/share/doc/octave-statistics/, but found nothing useful.
The Octave info file mentioned chi2inv, without saying how to access
it.
Matlab has a single namespace, so any function for which a license is
available is immediately available. Eventually I discovered that
Octave has chosen to make functions in extra packages visible only if
explicitly loaded. This does reduce namespace pollution - but it's a
new concept to people used to Matlab.
Please provide a file /usr/share/doc/octave-statistics/README.Debian
with a note something like
By default installed packages are not available from the Octave
prompt. The functions from this package can be added to the Octave
path by typing
pkg load statistics
at the Octave command line.
Please add a similar note for each of the extra packages:
octave-bsltl
octave-communications
octave-control
octave-geometry
octave-gsl
octave-image
octave-image-acquisition
octave-instrument-control
octave-io
octave-ltfat-common
octave-miscellaneous
octave-netcdf
octave-ocs
octave-odepkg
octave-optim
octave-parallel
octave-secs2d
octave-secs3d
octave-sockets
octave-statistics
octave-stk
octave-vibes
octave-zeromq
(determined via "apt-file search PKG_ADD|grep packages")
- Jim Van Zandt
-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (700, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages octave-statistics depends on:
ii octave 4.4.1-2+b1
ii octave-io 2.4.12-1
octave-statistics recommends no packages.
octave-statistics suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
