Re: Package system

[Søren Hauberg]

fre, 21 10 2005 kl. 16:20 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
> On 21-Oct-2005, Soren 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.
Sounds good.

> | 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?
A quick grep told me that octave only uses split in very few functions, 
so that should be easy to change. However, it's hard to tell how many people
are using the function. I think it's okay to break the API when doing
3.0 - that is the point of a major release. So I say, make the change.

> | 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.
I'm sorry my memory was misleading me. The patch is on the maintainers list:
http://www.octave.org/octave-lists/archive/octave-maintainers.2005/msg00536.html
(although I don't know how to download the patch from that link).

> | 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.
Okay, will look into tar, zip, unzip, etc.

> | 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")
Yeah, it looks strange to me too. The reason I went with this change is
that I throw all functions into one giant file.

> I'd like to include the package code with Octave.  Is that OK with
> you?
Of course. A package system isn't worth much if you have to install it
first :-)

/Soren

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> jwe
>