Re: Suggestion: startup.d subdirectory for use by octaverc

[Paul Kienzle]

On Jul 4, 2005, at 1:19 AM, James R. Phillips wrote:

> --- Paul Kienzle  wrote:
>
>
> > Anything in the system path is automatically located in octave.  If it
> > is not on the system path, but in some personal path, you can add 
> > e.g.,
> > LOADPATH=["~/octave//:",LOADPATH] to your .octaverc file and all
> > packages within ~/octave and all its subdirectories will be
> > automatically loaded.
>
> I detect a certain lack of enthusiasm for my idea ;).
>
> Sure, I am aware of this feature.  I'm thinking in terms of system
> administration and packaging design, not so much of user-installed 
> packages.
> Actually, I'm thinking ahead to producing an octave-forge package for 
> cygwin,
> and it seemed this feature might be handy, to eliminate the need for a
> post-install script that adds the octave-forge load path by editing 
> octaverc.

My point is that you do not need to add the octave-forge load path to 
octaverc if you install it in the standard system place.  Furthermore, 
if you have a packaging system for octave which installs user-local 
packages, you will only need a single entry in the octaverc file 
pointing to the root of the user-local directory, and this will 
automatically pick up all the user-local packages.  In either case, you 
do not need a post-install script to add the new package to the 
LOADPATH. The remaining package-specific startup features that you 
might put in startup directory can equally go into the PKG_ADD file for 
the package.

So as far as I can tell, adding a startup directory doesn't add any 
power or convenience.

> BTW, you're an octave-forge developer, I believe?  I have found that 
> the
> octave-forge makefile structure doesn't seem to support "out of tree" 
> builds.
> This is a commonly used method to keep the source tree clean during 
> the build,
> and is recommended by cygwin developers for cygwin packages.  If you 
> have any
> ideas on how to make octave-forge build "out of tree", I'd be 
> interested in
> them.  Otherwise I guess I'll just work around the issue.

I played with this a little a while back and concluded I didn't have 
time to do it properly.

Rather than spending time fixing the current system, I would recommend 
extending Søren's packaging system so that it can handle each of the 
octave-forge subdirectories independently, including out of tree 
builds, and have a small bit of build glue at the top which triggers 
the build in each subdirectory.

- Paul