pgk netlist

[Bob Weigel]

- pkglist.m implements a package listing from internet.  
- pkgget.m downloads a package.  
- xurlwrite.m is used for backward compatability and to work around a problem 
in urlwrite for Octave 2.9.9+ that has not been compiled with
cURL (separate email on this issues sent to the maintainers list).
- checkdeps.m is needed by xurlwrite.m

This a demonstration set of files that may be used as needed.

Here is a link to a related discussion 
[http://www.nabble.com/Test-web-site-of-new-octave-forge-web-site-including-all-packages-tf2417959.html#a6748784].
 

The following are my notes.  

Issues: 

* File integrity should be checked.  The easy way to do this is to have all of 
the files in a directory and have pkglist grab the file size from the 
listing.  A more common method is to have the md5 listed in the same 
directory of the file.

* Currently the package list is extracted from an html page in a
delicate manner.  The "right" way to do it would be to store the Name,
Description, URL strings in an XML file (say, info.xml) or a
JavaScript Object in a javascript file, (say info.js).  Both the a js
file in packages.html and the Octave program would then just need to be
read from the info file.

* As written, downloading and parsing of the web page is not executed
if packages.mat is found.  A better way to do this is to just look at
the last-modified date of packages.html (from HTTP header) and
re-download and parse if it has changes since packages.mat was
created.

Bob Weigel

pkgs.tgz
Description: application/tgz