RE: [OctDev] A few (Octave) ideas

[Schirmacher, Rolf]

Hello,

> From: Soren Hauberg [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 11:22 PM
> 
> Hi
> 
> tor, 03 06 2010 kl. 14:33 -0400, skrev Jake:
> > Naturally, I've got a couple of questions:
> >  

...

> > I've also got another idea concerning packages.  I was 
> reading through
> > the Octave manual the other day and saw the various difference pkg
> > functions and urlwrite.  Anyway, to cut to the chase, I 
> think it'd be
> > very useful and very easy to implement an extra pkg option to
> > automatically download and install Octave-Forge packages.  We could
> > keep a small text file on one of the Octave sites containing package
> > names along with their dependencies and download URLs.  The new
> > function would download this file, parse it, and then do 
> nothing more
> > than download packages with urlwrite and install them with 
> pkg install
> > (as well as ensuring that dependent packages are installed first).
> > It'd be awesome if you could take a fresh install of Octave 
> and simply
> > type in something like 'pkg get vrml'.  I'd LOVE to program 
> this much
> > at least and would like to hear what all of your thoughts 
> are on such
> > an idea.
> 
> This idea has been discussed previously, but nothing came of it.
> Basically, somebody needs to do the actual implementation.
> 
> Two potential issues:
> 
>      1. Security. I don't know the first thing about 
> security, so all I
>         can say is that you need to ensure that the user 
> doesn't end up
>         downloading and running malicious code.
>      2. Technically, I guess we don't have an official package
>         repository. In practice Octave-Forge serves this 
> purpose, but I
>         don't believe this is the official policy. If we are to change
>         'pkg' (which is part of Octave core) to download packages from
>         Octave-Forge, then this would very much be a blessing of
>         Octave-Forge. I don't know if that would be a good 
> thing or not,
>         but it would change the relationship between the two projects.
> 
> That being said, it is a feature I would like to see implemented.
> 
> Soren
> 

I would prefer this feature to be a pure "add-on" only. I can understand why
you would like to see it and why it is useful for some enviornments.
However, there are major drawbacks in other environments as well:
- Systems not connected to the internet (or not always connected to the
internet)
- Organisations with strong concerns w.r.t. to system integrity
- Systems which require a well documented configuration management
- Organisations which want to ensure "out of the box" interoperability of
systems 

In all of this cases, it is probably preferable to have some "distribution"
containing "everything" rolled out from time to time instead of having users
installing components step by step according to their actual needs. As mass
storage is (relatively) cheap today, having larger "distributions" is not
that much of an issue any more.

We see the effects of a likewise approach with the miktex TeX distribution -
for just one person using it, it is fine, but distributing some feature set
to a working group is getting much more involved now.

I guess that ensuring interoperability of downloaded features with already
installed components will also get a major issue, probably causing more
trouble in the long run than the benefit really is.

Just my 2 ct

Rolf 

There are 2 additional concerns here from my point of view