wrapQtAppsHook exists to do this for us. If you change the deriver from stdenv.mkDerivation to mkDerivation it will add the hook automatically. Also note, while those seem to be named exactly the same, mkDerivation will come from the qt5 attribute set because of the callPackage function (that I believe) this package should be using. You should also condition it's adding on optionals enableQt.

Correct. But, since octave is an interpreter, and it's build is so heavy, I'd argue we need an external wrapper derivation, so we would also be able to have a octave.withPackages interface, see #65398 and this comment.

I thought I would be able to postpone this until the 6.0.0 release, which I can't wait to get a hold on for a long time now.

Something modeled after wrapNeovim and wrapMpv could be done (see https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/88620/files). This change should also start with this:

diff --git i/pkgs/development/interpreters/octave/default.nix w/pkgs/development/interpreters/octave/default.nix
index 06d69ed8117..e4b527eaa6e 100644
--- i/pkgs/development/interpreters/octave/default.nix
+++ w/pkgs/development/interpreters/octave/default.nix
@@ -148,6 +148,7 @@ stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
   passthru = {
     inherit version;
     sitePath = "share/octave/${version}/site";
+    inherit enableQt enableJIT enableJava enableReadline;
   };
 
   meta = {

Maybe double wrapping wouldn't be that bad. I'm experimenting a fix for this on top of octave 6's release candidate.

P.S on https://github.com/doronbehar/nixpkgs/blob/pkg/octave/pkgs/development/interpreters/octave/default.nix

@doronbehar that makes sense, thanks. I'll update this PR to just use the right mkDerivation and test that, so we can either choose to merge or wait for a bigger refactoring.

@graham33 please, if you'd test this on Darwin it'll be helpful. Something like this should work:

doronbehar@7c6db88

The refactoring I'm working on are for Octave 6, and they come along other changes, so don't wait for me. I also did not find time to test the mkDerivation thing while testing my changes.

Updated but not yet tested.

I've tested this briefly on Darwin (also on NixOS) and I get a working Octave. For Darwin I had to cherry-pick 8e4e38c from staging to get a working build (it hasn't made it to master yet).

Just to briefly summarise the state of Octave on Darwin (at least from my brief testing, I don't use Darwin day-to-day): with the above fix the GUI works as long as you run with octave --force-gui, and as I mentioned basic editing/calculations/plotting seem to work. There are issues with the system menus sometimes not working, and it tends to hang/crash on exit. I imagine these issues might be improved via a Qt upgrade, but I haven't tried that.

Thanks :)