Re: packaging system

[Søren Hauberg]

Stefan van der Walt wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 18, 2005 at 12:46:14PM +0200, S?ren Hauberg wrote:
>
> > Perhaps this approach is to simple? How much power should a package 
> > creator have?
>
>
> It takes a lot of effort to geta system like this into place, so I
> thought we might as well make it flexible.  That doesn't necessarily
> mean a lot of additional effort.
Depends on how flexible it is :-)
You said in another mail the pre-install.m should be able to alter the 
installation struct (a structure containing various details on the 
installation, e.g. installation directory etc). This would give the 
packager alot of power, but why should the packager be able to alter the 
installation directory?
My concern is that if we give the packager to much power, the 
installation script will have to perform alot of checking on what the 
package does to make sure it doesn't screw things up. Of course, if the 
packager doesn't have enough power the package system ends up unused.

> > P.S. Where can I get some information on the INDEX format
> It's a very simple format -- look at the files included with Octave
> Forge.  We have C++, Octave and Python parsers for it already :)
OK, so this is a file format to list which packages contains which 
files, right? I don't see the advantage of using this fileformat instead 
of putting the files from different packages in seperate directories. Am 
I missing the obvious?

/Søren

> Regards
> Stefan