Package system

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi,
I just turned in a larger project for school, so now I have some time to
look at package management. Here's a summary of what's cooking in the
land of package systems, for details see
http://hauberg.org/octave-package/

== Good news ==
I think the package system is fully implemented, with support for the
following:
  *) Dependency checking at install and uninstall time.
  *) Multible installation roots, meaning it is possible to have
per-user packages on multi-user systems.
  *) Octave-forge packages 'signal' and 'image' was very easy to port,
so I assume the rest of Octave-forge will be too.

== Bad news ==
1) There's currently alot of code. It's all written in .m files and the
code should be pretty easiy to read once you get the structure of a
package. But still, there's alot of code.

2) Some of the code is not system-independent, and might not be easily
ported to platforms other then *nix. I haven't worked on another
platform then Linux for years, so I really don't know.

3) There's currently no other documentation.

/Soren