Re: package system

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-May-2006, Tom Holroyd (NIH/NIMH) [E] wrote:

| By the way, are packages automatically downloaded from the web?

Not in the current code, which you can find here:

  http://hauberg.org/octave-package

Longer term, I think we want to be able to fetch files from the web.

| I think for a first cut you don't want that functionality: it's better
| to download by hand and then install (install where?  A specified
| directory?  The site directory?  Need root?).  Is there an install
| script that comes with the package?  Then pkg install would run the
| script to do the unpacking.

The current code installs in either

    local_list = tilde_expand("~/.octave_packages");
    global_list = [OCTAVE_HOME "share/octave/octave_packages"];

depending on whether it looks like the user is root (I think this test
will fail for the MinGW version of Octave).

| Is there a way to create a package and
| automatically build the install script from a manifest or similar?

I don't see one yet.

There are still some things to implement.  My goal here is to get the
code in Octave so it will be more visible and we can fix it to do most
of the things people want.

jwe