someone else might be able to identify the error from what you posted, but without being able to attempt the installation ourselves we might just going to be guessing.  They've put the distribution and source behind an 'academics only' restricted access portal, which is fine, but unless one of the developers has an academic credential and wants to request access we can't get there.  Plus, it appears that we'd have to troubleshoot against code that is >=3 major releases old, which is less likely to happen.

The correct approach is to:
1) let the package maintainers know that their code does not work under recent versions of octave, and perhaps they could reach out to the Octave dev team if they don't know how to fix their code themselves.

2) Or just ask them to come contribute to this bug report.

3) Or they could tell you under exactly which octave version and on what operating systems they have confirmed their package works, and you use that.

4) Or they could post their package source in a way that allows octave developers to test compiling/installing.

5) OR, as the website indicates that the full code is being distributed under GPLv3, you should be fully able to fork/host/redistribute the source code for testing/examination.  They have a lot of restrictive language for getting access to the code, though, and I don't fully understand how some of the limitations they mention there is GPL compliant with GPLv3 section 7 regarding 'Additional Terms' or 10 regarding 'further restrictions', but again IANAL.

without access to the package source there's little opportunity for us to help troubleshoot the issue.

Thank you for your answers.

The problem really came from the version of Octave. However, I, now, get a fatal error : octave/oct.h: No such file or directory.

Throughout my research, I didn't get why and how could this error appear knowing that i'm running my command on Octave directly ?
I have a whole of bunch of error appearing but I feel like it all comes down from this fatal error (but i may be wrong)

All the errors appearing :

lib/input.cpp: In function 'ScanOPs scans_from_file(const Path&, Int32)':
lib/input.cpp:109:21: error: invalid initialization of reference of type 'const String&' {aka 'const std::__cxx11::basic
_string<char>&'} from expression of type 'const Path' {aka 'const std::filesystem::__cxx11::path'}
  109 |     if(!file_exists(path)) {
      |                     ^~~~
In file included from include/datastructures.h:8,
                 from lib/input.cpp:7:
include/util.h:39:14: note: in passing argument 1 of 'bool file_exists(const String&)'
   39 | file_exists( String const& );
      |              ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
lib/input.cpp:113:49: error: invalid initialization of reference of type 'const String&' {aka 'const std::__cxx11::basic
_string<char>&'} from expression of type 'const Path' {aka 'const std::filesystem::__cxx11::path'}
  113 |     const String ext = lowercase(file_extension(path));
      |                                                 ^~~~
In file included from include/datastructures.h:8,
                 from lib/input.cpp:7:
include/util.h:45:16: note: in passing argument 1 of 'String file_extension(const String&)'
   45 | file_extension(String const &);
      |                ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
lib/input.cpp:124:63: error: invalid initialization of reference of type 'const String&' {aka 'const std::__cxx11::basic
_string<char>&'} from expression of type 'const Path' {aka 'const std::filesystem::__cxx11::path'}
  124 |         std::cout<<"Unknown file extension: "<<file_extension(path)<<" for file " <<path<<"\n";
      |                                                               ^~~~
In file included from include/datastructures.h:8,
                 from lib/input.cpp:7:
include/util.h:45:16: note: in passing argument 1 of 'String file_extension(const String&)'
   45 | file_extension(String const &);
      |                ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In file included from lib/octave-connect.cpp:4:
include/octave-connect.h:11:10: fatal error: octave/oct.h: No such file or directory
   11 | #include <octave/oct.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
lib/peak.cc:3:10: fatal error: octave/oct.h: No such file or directory
    3 | #include <octave/oct.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~

in the meantime, from the error message your reported, I suspect the issue is on the package side.

"function called with too many inputs" is an error message introduced after version 7.1 with this change: https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/b0b80efecea1

See https://octave.org/NEWS-7.html
"Calling a user-defined function with too many inputs or outputs is now an error. The interpreter makes this check automatically."

It means that you called a function with more inputs than that function was designed to take.  What's unclear is what the "pre-install" function is trying to do. It could be that an octave function definition changed and the package is still trying to call it the old way, or it could mean that a package function is making an internal function call with excess arguments and that was allowed to slide in old versions.

In any case, we're guessing without access to the code or participation of the package maintainers.

Hi,

I'm trying to install the mvapack package and while installing it as shown in the mvapack documentation I get this error:

>> pkg install "mvapack-20231102.tar.gz"

error: pre_install: function called with too many inputs
error: called from
    pre_install
    install>prepare_installation at line 377 column 7
    install at line 201 column 7
    pkg at line 619 column 9

I already contacted the Mvapack support and they tlod me that It was probably more of an Octave problem than a problem on their side.

Do you have any idea what the issue is ?

Thank you for your answer,
Julien.