[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #51684] Request for Windows Portable zip version without absolute paths & system hooks

[Mike Miller]

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #51684 (project octave):

>From a high-level view, in order to actually address this, it would help to
itemize what the little things are that would make this work, and then address
them in individual bug reports. For some there are already open bug reports,
so please try to find those and add them as dependencies of this bug.

For example there are already open bug reports about making the user
configuration depend on the USERPROFILE setting in Windows, and on the
Freedesktop configuration setting on unixy systems. If startup scripts, config
files, history, etc could be read from another directory based on well-known
environment variables like USERPROFILE and XDG_CONFIG_HOME, that would take
care of a small piece of this.

The Octave interpreter already has a facility to load startup commands from
package global, site global, and user-specific locations. I suspect that Qt
has a facility for loading its settings files this way also, so the GUI
settings could live with the software rather than in the user's home/profile
directory.

Another change might be to make the default global and local pkg paths depend
on OCTAVE_HOME and USERPROFILE or XDG_DATA_HOME by default  if that's not
already the case (e.g. I set up my environment to install packages in
~/.local/lib/octave and ~/.local/share/octave). The global pkg prefix and
cache are the relevant ones for Windows users by default.

And then of course you want the _contents_ of the pkg cache that contain
OCTAVE_HOME in their path name to also use the value of OCTAVE_HOME, so when
the whole thing moves to a different location you don't have to rebuild the
cache.

And you probably want all of this to work when OCTAVE_HOME is a path name with
spaces or non-ASCII characters in it.

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