octave tools in C++ form

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Nov-2006, address@hidden wrote:

| Hi,
|  
| In my attempt to port octave tools (octave-config, mkoctfile) to native 
Win32, I converted
| the shell scripts into (almost) equivalent C++ code. The actual shell script 
does not heavily
| rely on the underlying shell, and the porting was quite straightforward. This 
port also solves
| the relocation/OCTAVE_HOME problem and removes the dependency of octave on
| an existing shell (I wanted to get rid of it).
|  
| The files are attached. Of course, you might not agree with this idea, so 
take this code more
| as a \"for your information, if you want to use it\".

I don't object to this change, but I noticed at least one problem that
prevents me from checking these programs in as replacements for the
scripts.  In the scripts, we use lines like this

  : ${VAR="val"}

to set VAR to "val" unless VAR is already set in the environment.
This way, you can override the default values with commands like this

  CXXFLAGS="-ggdb3" mkoctfile foo.cc

(assuming a POSIX shell).  I think it would be good to preserve this
capability.

Also, I would prefer to avoid duplicating the function that
substitutes OCTAVE_HOME (or other code that would be common to these
programs), and I would prefer to have these programs also follow the
coding conventions of the rest of Octave.

Thanks,

jwe