Re: Geometry Chapter of the manual

[Quentin Spencer]

John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 16-Jul-2007, David Bateman wrote:
>
> | Thanking about what to do with the Geometry chapter of the manual that
> | only contains the function polyarea, it seems to me the logical thing to
> | do would be to port the octave-forge functions convhull, convhulln,
> | delaunay, delaunay3, delaunayn, griddata, tsearch, voronoi and voronoin
> | and make a real chapter out of it. These are all core functions of
> | matlab. However, the reason I didn't do this in the past is that this
> | would require a dependency on the QHULL package to be added to Octave.
> | Are we willing to accept an additional dependency on QHULL? If so I'm
> | willing to do the conversion work..
>
> I don't have a problem with the additional dependency provided that it
> is optional.
>  

The addition of the sparse matrix dependencies seemed to cause a fair 
amount of confusion on the help list. I have no problem with adding more 
dependencies, but maybe we need to make it clearer to people who want to 
compile octave themselves that they are optional. I don't know how to do 
that--any ideas? Maybe there should be a document somewhere telling 
people how to install the development packages for common 
distributions--that one seems to trip people up a lot.

Quentin