Re: Package system

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-Oct-2005, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| >   * I recently modified rmdir to accept an optional second argument
| >     ("s") which if present tells rmdir to work recursively (this
| >     choice was for compatibility; I guess the "s" means
| >     "subdirectories too"), so we shouldn't need the rm_rf.m file.
| Okay. I'm using 2.9.3 and would prefer not working on CVS version as a have 
| to do "real work" too. I'm guessing CVS is too unstable for that, right?

I hope to make a new snapshot soon.

| I'd be happy to this (writing untar was dead easy), but I just have two 
| questions:
| 1) Could we change split to return a cell array instead of an array?
| This would IMHO be a good thing anyway, and would make untar work
| without a lot of hassle.

Yes, I think it would be better to return a cell.  But how much code
might that break?  Should we just do it anyway?

| There's a patch for this somewhere on the bugs list.

I don't see the patch, so if you could find it that would help.

| 2) Is the approach taking in untar acceptable? It's basicly just a
| system call, but that's not going to be portable (I'm thinking about
| windows here).

It's not really a problem if Octave is running under Cygwin (one of
the big advantages Cygwin provides is a useful POSIX environment).
But yes, it would be a problem for Octave running on Windows without
Cygwin.  But I don't think it makes sense to try to duplicate the
functionality of things like tar, gzip, or zip inside of Octave.  So
using system() is probably the best solution.

| I have just changed the syntax to one function called pkg that accepts 
| -install, -uninstall, etc, as you described. Then get_unsatisfied_deps 
| can become a function inside the pkg file.

OK.

Since Octave allows

  x = pkg -list

I think we are OK with this change.  OTOH, that kind of statement
always looks a little odd to me.  OTTH, I suppose you can always write

  x = pkg ("-list")

I'd like to include the package code with Octave.  Is that OK with
you?

Thanks,

jwe