General information
===================

The octave-doc package contains extra documentation in PDF and HTML formats
which can be found in the doc-base system or directly under
/usr/share/doc/octave once this supplementary package is installed. It also
installs documentation in the Info format.

Further information on Octave, the Octave mailing-lists and the Octave 
source archive can be found at https://www.octave.org/

The Debian Octave-related packages are collectively maintained by the Debian
Octave Group (https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianOctaveGroup).


Using ATLAS or OpenBLAS libs with GNU Octave
============================================

In order to speed up Octave's linear algebra operations, you can install the
ATLAS package (libatlas3-base), or the OpenBLAS package (libopenblas-base).
Octave should automatically pick up the faster libraries. For more information
about BLAS and LAPACK in Debian, see:

 https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/LinearAlgebraLibraries


About Octave-Forge packages
===========================

If you want to install packages from the Octave-Forge project
(https://octave.sourceforge.io/), the recommended way is to use the packages
distributed by Debian. Most Octave-Forge packages are available in Debian under
the name octave-<pkgname> (for example, the statistics package from
Octave-Forge is available as the octave-statistics package in Debian). The use
of the `pkg install' command at the Octave prompt and may interfere
with the package management system in Debian.

Note that Octave is not configured to autoload the installed packages.
This means that the functions provided by the installed packages will
not be available at the Octave prompt at startup.  Therefore, each
package must be individually loaded by using the `pkg load' command.
One way to automatically load all the installed packages at startup
time is to add the following code to the initialization file
`~/.octaverc':

  pkgs = pkg ("list");
  for i = 1 : numel (pkgs)
    pkg ("load", pkgs{i}.name);
  endfor

If you do this, remember that other users may not have Octave
configured to load packages at startup. Therefore, if you write code
for others, your scripts still need to load the packages they require.


Why is mkoctfile not in octave, but in liboctave-dev?
=====================================================

In order to use mkoctfile, one needs the development packages (headers, .a
libraries) of the libraries used by Octave (fftw, blas, ...). These sum up to a
lot of space; an installation of liboctave-dev will trigger the installation of
these packages, so one can use mkoctfile then.

pkg.m is not part of liboctave-dev as it's used to find already installed
packages (via /etc/octave.conf).

 -- Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org>, Thu,  4 Jan 2018 15:57:09 +0100

