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RE: System wide configurations


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: RE: System wide configurations
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:41:21 -0400

On 31-Oct-2007, Schirmacher, Rolf wrote:

| If you are not a developer, but simply a user of a binary distribution (and
| to make things worse, assume working with windows and having no
| administrative rights :-(, then there is a problem how to update to a new
| release.
| 
| The traditional, clean approach for naive windows users is 
| - uninstall octave x.x.old
| - install octave x.x.new
| Something like this was often requested to do some system clean up before
| starting a new installation. Having 2 releases of one software package in
| parallel without problems is still not that common on some systems...
| 
| But then, everything under $prefix might/will be gone :-(
| This includes all changes you did to your files (o.k., you should have send
| patches to improve octave for all...) and also any kind of site/machine
| specific configuration, e.g. in $prefix/share/octave/site. Nevertheless
| $prefix/share/octave/site sounds like the right place for such
| configurations and probably they should not get lost when updating to octave
| x.x.new ...
| 
| Simply running install on an existing installation on the other hand is
| often not a good idea either. You might end up with a mixture which might be
| difficult to clean up later.
| 
| So, which directories shoud be preserved and how should it be done best? How
| to make this simple for the users described at the beginning of this mail?

Are you asking me?  I think this is outside the scope of the normal
function of the install target in Octave's makefiles.  It sounds to me
more like something that should be handled by people making binary
packages of Octave for various systems.  I'm not opposed to changes in
Octave's build process that makes packaging easier, but patches for
any such changes will have to come from the people doing the
packaging as I have no idea what is needed and little personal
interest in this problem.

jwe


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