mkpkgadd

[Paul Kienzle]

Hi,

I've started adding PKGADD stuff to octave-forge.  

(1) The simplist thing to do is use mkpkgadd directly from octave. 
Obviously I
will need to put in my own copy for this release, but shouldn't mkpkgadd be
added to /usr/local/bin, or maybe 
/usr/local/libexec/octave-2.1.xx/exec/arch-xxx
assuming octave-config can report the location of the exec path to the 
makefile?

(2) oct-file functions may also need PKGADD stuff --- either for my as yet
unfinished type dispatch stuff or for marking them as text commands.  But
mkpkgadd operates on the installed directory, not on the source 
directory, so
any PKGADD stuff would be lost.  Should the PKGADD file act more like
a database which can replace the directives associated with a file when
you install a new file in the directory? Or should I create a file such as
<mypackage>.add which mkpkgadd automatically concatenates
when it builds the PKGADD file?  Presumably <mypackage>.add
would be built automatically by somthing like mkpkgadd which scans
the C++, C and Fortran files for ## PKGADD directives.  

We will need something similar to process embedded test cases.  

And the same for help strings.  That way we wouldn't have to embed them
in string constants, but instead say ## HELP followed by the help string.  
We could almost do this now using document, except that document is
associated with actual symbols in the symbol table, not ones that we
promise will be there.

Hmmm...., how could we get spfind, the find function which works for
sparse [which will eventually be dispatched on find when the first argument
is a sparse matrix], to add a blurb to the help description for find 
saying that it
also works on sparse matrices?  document_add(x,text) maybe?

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden