RE: [OctDev] automatic download of forge packages

[Søren Hauberg]

man, 07 06 2010 kl. 08:20 -0400, skrev Jake:
> So there's still some manual work involved then.  I was envisioning
> something more like apt-get on Ubuntu, where it would tell you what main
> packages it was going to install, the dependencies it also needs to install,
> and finally prompt you to make sure that it's okay to install all of them.
> I really don't see a point to this unless it does take care of the
> dependencies since pkg install will fail without those dependencies.
> 
> I hadn't gotten a chance to implement my idea, but it was like this:
> 
> 1. There would be a package list containing package names, dependencies and
> download URLs in the form of a struct array stored in a .mat file on one of
> the Octave servers.  That way it could be loaded easily with no parsing
> involved.  This file would be downloaded and loaded first.

This is *not* an option.

Whatever information you want to store about packages on the
Octave-Forge server should be stored on a package by package basis. 
The scheme you suggest would require that one file contains information
about all packages. Maintaining this file will be a nightmare as
somebody will have to manually update it every time a package is
released.

Why not just put the DESCRIPTION files of all packages on-line, e.g.

  http://octave.sf.net/image/DESCRIPTION

? We already have a parser for such files...

Soren