Re: pkg manager improvement?

[Søren Hauberg]

Michael Goffioul skrev:
> Hi,
>
> After having used the package manager under Win32, I thought about 2
> possible modifications. Maybe these are already possible, but I didn't find
> how to achieve it.
>
> 1) is it possible to modify the autoload status of a package that is 
> already
> installed? I found that adding a .autoload file in packinfo dir is
> enough, however,
> it would be better to provide an interface to it through pkg.m (you 
> could then
> also modify the data structure stored in global_list and/or local_list)
Should be easy to do. From the command line you can do
  packages = pkg("list");
  packages{1}.autoload = "Yes";
And then save that structure to .octaverc. This should cause package #1 
to be autoloaded. It should be easy to add such a functionality to pkg.m

> 2) from a packaging point of view, it would be nice to be able to install
> a pre-compiled package into the right location and simply tell the package
> manager to update its internal data structure, without any compilation step
If you precompile a package and but the files that need to be 
distributed in the 'inst' directory in a package the compiled files 
should also be installed when you install the package. So there really 
isn't any difference between a binary and a source package (from the 
package managers point of view). So this should be possible without any 
changes to pkg.m. It would however be nice to have a
  pkg build_binary
option in pkg.m that created a binary package from a source package. 
(Shouldn't be too hard to add).

Søren