Re: Writing 'help' functions as m-files

[John W. Eaton]

On  4-Feb-2009, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| tir, 27 01 2009 kl. 11:48 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
| > On 23-Jan-2009, Søren Hauberg wrote:
| > | > Is there more to do?  I remember some discussion about cache files and
| > | > needing to generate those when Octave is installed.  Am I remembering
| > | > correctly?  Can you do that, or explain what needs to be done?
| > | 
| > | Basically, we need to call 'gen_doc_cache ()' at some point. This
| > | function traverses the 'path ()' and generates a cache in each
| > | directory. A cache is just a simple '.mat' file that contains the help
| > | texts of the files in the directory. I am not sure when it is best to do
| > | this
| > | 
| > |   * when Octave is built, or
| > |   * when Octave is installed.
| > | 
| > | I'm guessing both will work. I'm guessing that the easiest solution is
| > | to run 'octave --eval gen_doc_cache ()' at the end of the installation.
| > 
| > I think it should be done at build time so that running Octave in
| > place will work.  Then the generated files can be installed.
| 
| First of all, sorry about the late reply...
| 
| So, I'd like to run 'gen_doc_cache' when Octave is built, which I guess
| boils down to
| 
|   ./run-octave --eval gen_doc_cache
| 
| But I fear this won't work. The 'gen_doc_cache' function simply
| traverses the current path and creates a cache for each directory in the
| path. The problem is that the path seems to be different when running
| './run-octave', than when running an installed octave. Specifically, in
| './run-octave' we have
| 
|   /home/sh/Dokumenter/octave/octave-hg/upstream/src
|   /home/sh/Dokumenter/octave/octave-hg/upstream/src/OPERATORS
|   /home/sh/Dokumenter/octave/octave-hg/upstream/src/TEMPLATE-INST
|   /home/sh/Dokumenter/octave/octave-hg/upstream/src/DLD-FUNCTIONS
|   /home/sh/Dokumenter/octave/octave-hg/upstream/src/pic
| 
| in the path, whereas in an installed Octave we have
| 
|   /home/sh/Programmer//libexec/octave/3.1.51+/site/oct/i686-pc-linux-gnu
|   /home/sh/Programmer//libexec/octave/site/oct/api-v33
| +/i686-pc-linux-gnu
|   /home/sh/Programmer//libexec/octave/site/oct/i686-pc-linux-gnu
|   /home/sh/Programmer//share/octave/3.1.51+/site/m
|   /home/sh/Programmer//share/octave/site/api-v33+/m
| 
| in the path. So, if I run 'gen_doc_cache' via './run-octave' the path
| I'll be traversing won't correspond to the path that's available when
| Octave is installed.
| 
| Any thoughts or comments?

If the files that need to be generated for Octave to run in place are
different from the ones that are needed when Octave is installed, then
we will have to generate the files when building and then again when
installing.

jwe