Re: Error installing the symbol package

[Mike Miller]

On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 22:31:31 -0700, Colin Macdonald wrote:
> Oops, you're right.  This seems fairly serious then: some/most/all (?)
> Windows users cannot install the symbolic package without doing some manual
> patching, and the process by which they do so is not explicitly
> documented...  :(  Or have I still missed the point and this is "merely"
> some noisy warnings?

I can't test myself, but I think you are right that it affects any
Windows user using the Octave 4.2.0 or 4.2.1 official binaries. I think
it does prevent installation of the symbolic package with an error until
the Perl module in question is manually patched, or the symbolic package
is unpacked and patched to remove offending doc strings.

This probably wasn't caught early because the symbolic package is not
included in the distribution and because it may be the only package to
use wide characters in doc strings to trigger this bug.

It might be wise for us to add a test to Octave's own test suite to make
sure that wide characters can be handled by the help functions.

-- 
mike