doc function doesn't work

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The octave.info file is in the octave-info package, which is listed in the Suggests for octave, have you tried installing that package to resolve this error? Did you read /usr/share/doc/octave/README.Debian which discusses the octave-{doc,htmldoc,info} packages? Can you think of ways this could be made clearer to the user?

doc function is a built-in function of Octave, right?

Why should I manually install a separate package to make it work?

Yes, the doc command is part of core Octave. The command is working, it's just reporting an error that the documentation is not installed. As I asked before, can you think of ways this could be made more clear to the user?

Not all users want or need the full user manual installed, which is why the HTML, Info, and PDF manuals for Octave are intentionally split into separate packages.

This was reported previously at http://bugs.debian.org/555646.

> The command is working, it's just reporting an error that the documentation is not installed.

No, it appears that it is just broken.

Mike --- thanks for trying to make ubuntu a better host for octave.

I do think that Ma has a good point though.

If you do 'sudo apt-get install octave', you pick up a lot of things, including the man page, and the man page indicates that you can see the documentation for octave from within octave by typing 'doc' (without the quotes) to the octave prompt.

This in fact does not work, so it looks like a bug somewhere.

Now, in these days of mighty search engines, one can locate this page pretty quickly and rectify things by 'sudo apt-get install octave-info'.

So maybe not so serious a bug.

However, actually fixing it would seem to require some action like either (a) forking the man page for octave to get rid of the false statement, or (b) forking the code for octave so that when you type 'doc' it responds with a message like 'please install octave-info', or (c) merging the octave-info and octave packages. (Personally, i think (a) and (b) would be insane, and (c) might not be politically possible. But although there certainly may be some users who want the complex program without all forms of the documentation installed, i wonder what their count is, and how serious their concerns are on our modern computers with RAM measured in gigabytes and disk measured in terabytes.)

But no matter what, i do appreciate your providing a work-around in the form of a path to add the documentation to the complex software product. Thanks for your help, and cheers!! :) :)

Dan, thanks for your constructive feedback.

I have actually worked to implement option (b) in upstream Octave, so the next release will have the ability to show an error message when the files needed for the doc command are not installed on your system. So in addition to README.Debian, users will also see an appropriate error message in the Octave interpreter telling them what additional packages to install on their system.

Mike --- that's pretty impressive.

When 14.04 comes out, i'll be looking forward to seeing how it plays.

I'm marking this as fixed now. Octave 3.8.0 is in the 14.04 beta release now, and the "doc" and "mkoctfile" commands now instruct the user on which missing packages to install if the needed files are not found on the system. Thanks for this bug report and feedback to help address this issue. Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find.