PKG wishlist

[David Bateman]

Soren,

Now that I've really used the package manager for development, I find I
have a problem with it when trying to test code. Essentially, I have to
make a sandbox for each package and its dependencies to run the test
code in. The main reason for this is that there are some toolboxes that
are mutually exclusive (ie NaN toolbox and lots of other things).
However, the name of the file containing the package doesn't
neccessarily have any relationship with the name of the package for the
purposes of dependency checking. Therefore, I can't automatically
resolve the dependencies of one package on another by reading the
DESCRIPTION file and find the corresponding filename.

The only solution I have at the moment is that I have to extract all of
the DESCRIPTION files, maintaining a correspondence with the name of the
file it came from and then exhaustively search these files for any
dependencies. Systems like deb and rpm resolve this issue by requiring
that the file name corresponds to the name of the package, and then
resolving the dependency is just a matter of at worst running "find".

Can and should we change the package manager to enforce that the name of
the package corresponds to the file name? This would be easy to enforce
in pkg.m, and not more harder in octave-forge to build the package from
DESCRIPTON(name:) rather than the directory name.

Regards
David

-- 
David Bateman                                address@hidden
Motorola Labs - Paris                        +33 1 69 35 48 04 (Ph) 
Parc Les Algorithmes, Commune de St Aubin    +33 6 72 01 06 33 (Mob) 
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