Arch Linux User Repository

TODO:

1. Figure out the users and permissions. Currently, /opt/MATLAB/${_release} has 777 permissions, which is obviously undesired. It might be better to create a user group and require users to manually add themselves to it for security reasons.

2. Improve the installer. For example, the current inotify watcher spams stdout and does not account for the end of the download/installation or the width of the terminal, which results in flaky output.

3. Figure out the dependencies. The list of Debian/RHEL dependencies is public, but it includes some seemingly unneeded packages. This might be because they are required by dependent products/add-ons. Additionally, the current logic for removing bundled dependencies should probably be rewritten. Maintaining an exhaustive list for a single release is very difficult, and these components change without notice. Moreover, the current approach may go against the Arch KISS philosophy. Ideally, we should remove only the problematic components like Qt, XCB, libtiff, gcc-libs, fontconfig, etc.

4. Add auto-discovery for packages written for MATLAB. My plan was to use /usr/lib/MATLAB/${_release} for release-specific modules and /usr/lib/MATLAB/common for shared (mostly architecture-independent) packages. However, load order matters, and "common" modules need to specify which releases they are compatible with. This means we need to implement our own logic for discovering and loading these, likely via hooks, shell scripts, and configuration files (perhaps TOML could work?).

5. Fix the Python components. python-matlabengine does install the Python components built against the version of Python shipped by Arch. However, some proprietary CPython components are not included and are built against ancient Python versions. This likely requires version spoofing or some alternative approach.

6. Write and upload packages for previous MATLAB releases. It is entirely possible to have multiple releases installed simultaneously. I have a few of these packages myself, but they are drafts and not suitable for upload to the AUR.

7. Write and upload packages for MATLAB-dependent add-ons and products. When installing MATLAB required user intervention for source access, it was acceptable to break reproducibility and manually specify required products for installation. Now that we use MPM, it would be better to separate products into individual packages. These packages would install themselves and their dependencies into a specific location, then use appdata to install only the component's files. The problem is that MATLAB often includes conflicting files that need to be combined or overwritten. Obviously, we can't allow that, so a hook must be implemented to, for example, combine *.combine@matlab-simulink and replace *.replace@matlab-documentation files with backups. Needless to say, this is challenging to implement, so the previous approach (having users specify the product list) might still be preferred.

8. Write and upload the matlab-runtime package. I have a draft, but the problem with this package is that it installs the runtime for every available product. Ideally, for source-built packages, we would want to makedepend on matlab-$product and depend on matlab-$product-runtime. However, this is not possible without splitting the runtime packages, which poses the challenges described above. I’ll try my best to revisit this sometime later.

@aoneko, @Reexys, please read the post-installation instructions. If you've lost them, you can find the same information here.

This package needs co-maintainers as I'm not able to test against R2015b since I do not own it. If you own R2015b and are willing to give it a try please get in touch.

sadly i can’t just add R2015b: your pkgbuild expects a license.txt which isn’t there