On Dec 30, 2007, at 10:41 PM, Thomas Treichl wrote: Ben Abbott schrieb:
Thomas,
I think there is some confusion, perhaps it began on my end?
In any event, the problem I've been looking at occurs when savepath.m is run and then octave is updated to a new version.
For example, if savepath.m is run from octave 2.9.15(?), and octave is updated (say to 3.0.0), then when octave 3.0.0 is run the working path is replaced by the that of 2.9.15. In the event that the 2.9.15 version has been deleted, the result is a nonfunctional octave. If 2.9.15 is not deleted, octave 3.0.0 will still try to use the m-files and oct-files of the 2.9.15 version ... perhaps the result would be partially functional.
So what I was hoping to discuss were approaches to (1) update without worries of loading a non-functional path from .octaverc, and (2) would it be possible for .octaverc to support multiple versions of octave simultaneously?
There are many approaches to reconciling this. I decided to try to limit myself to savepath.m since it is responsible for adding the path information to .octaverc.
After some thought on how savepath.m might be modified to avoid including version specific paths, I decided to try extract the portions of that path that are not present in the pathdef (let's call that portion userpath), and then store the result in .octaverc as
path ([pathdef, pathsep, userpath]);
Then if a change to a new version of octave occurs, octave will load a functioning path. I have completed such a modification to savepath.m and it appears to work as expected.
One unfortunate feature of this approach is that the resulting path does not respect the "-end" and "-begin" options of addpath().
Thoughts?
Everything makes sense to me that you have found out. I would say you send a copy of your email (the part above) and your code modifications that you've implemented to the discussion that has been started at the maintainers-list.
The only thing that I'm currently thinking about: Should 'savepath' really write anything directly into the .octaverc file if no input argument is given?
Thomas,
As you suggested I've attached that patch.
In my case, my user .octaverc file contains these three lines
## Begin savepath auto-created section, do not edit path ([pathdef,pathsep,'/Users/bpabbott/Documents/Octave']); ## End savepath auto-created section
To All, I'd like to hear more opinions. Is this patch a good idea, is there a better way?
Ben
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savepath.patch