Autoloading of toolboxes?

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Jan-2007, David Bateman wrote:

| One major difference between toolboxes installed with pkg and similar
| toolboxes under matlab is the need to explicitly load the toolboxes with
| the "pkg load <package>" or "pkg load all" commands. In matlab an
| installed toolboxes is always available if a license is available.

If the packages are installed, then I think Octave should load them,
and users should not have to do anything more to enable the packages.
This is separate from the issue of whether the packages should all be
bundled and installed together.

| This
| might confuse some users, and so I wonder whether we should include the line
| 
| ## PKG_ADD: pkg("load","all");
| 
| in pkg.m... Thoughts?

Is this the best place for it, or should this statement (or something
similar) be added to the main octaverc file?

Should the diretories for add-on packages be placed at the end of the
load path by default?  I think that it is confusing for users when
they install a package that replaces Octave functions and things break
because the replacement functions work differently.  Remember the code
in FIXES from Octave Forge?  I think we want to avoid that kind of
thing in the future.  Maybe we need to have some kind of warning
so that users know when a package shadows existing functions.  If we
opt for a warning it can be optional but I think it should be on by
default.

jwe