Re: Octave Packaging

[Paul Kienzle]

On Jun 11, 2007, at 11:51 AM, David Bateman wrote:

> Thomas,
>
> I think this thread needs to be opened for wider discussion. As you 
> are basically question the need for Octave to have a package manager 
> at all.  This is something that was extensively discussed over the 
> last few years and the consensus was that it is something that is 
> needed to make distribution of software for Octave easier for users. 
> This goal should also make distribution not difficult for debian 
> either.

Thomas,

Here's a suggestion:  you could write a generic configure script (not 
generated by autoconf) and Makefile which call the octave package 
manager to do the work.  These could be inserted automatically by the 
pkg dist command.  This would also work for bundles of packages.

Having these files means that the sysadmin who doesn't know the details 
of Octave but still needs to support her users can write:

        ./configure; make; make install

as usual and have everything just work (after resolving dependencies).

Hopefully we can handle the scaling problem nicely as the number of 
packages goes up, though this will mean including even more features 
(e.g., centralized distribution and dependencies) that are currently 
handled by Linux distributions.

        - Paul