Api-versioned directories in Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Feb-2005, Rafael Laboissiere <address@hidden> wrote:

| I see here:
| 
| $ dpkg -L octave2.1 | grep api
| /usr/share/octave/site/api-v12
| /usr/share/octave/site/api-v12/m
| /usr/lib/octave/site/oct/api-v12
| /usr/lib/octave/site/oct/api-v12/i386-pc-linux-gnu
| 
| Is there any reason why there is the "api-v12/m" directory above?  I thought
| that api-version was only necessary for .oct loadable modules and not for .m
| scripts.

I guess it is a holdover from having version-specific directories.
Maybe that doesn't matter for the site directory tree now.  I'm not
sure.  What should we have?  An api for the .oct files, nothing
special for the site directory?  All of this version/api stuff was
intended to allow multiple versions of Octave to be installed at
once.  To do that might require site directories for each version (or
api), even for .m files because there could be incompatible changes in
the language.

Maybe for simplicity we should drop all the version/api-specific
directories.  Installing multiple versions simultaneously is still
possible by using --prefix=/usr/local/octave-VERSION (or similar) as a
configure option (and it may be the best way to do this sort of thing
anyway, because then removing a particular version is as simple as an
rm -rf /usr/local/octave-VERSION).

Comments?

jwe