Re: URL for forge packages

[Ben Abbott]

On Aug 16, 2012, at 8:14 AM, Carnë Draug wrote:

> Hi
> 
> the current method to get the URL for packages when installing with
> the -forge flag is to parse the HTML of the package for the version
> and use it to generate a URL to download it. I see two problems with
> this:
> 
> 1. if we are to change the format of the documentation page this will
> start failing
> 2. if we move the packages to another host (as has been discussed
> before), it will also fail
> 
> While such changes are not planned to happen on OF soon, when they do
> it will mean that users using octave versions before the change won't
> be able to use the -forge flag. I think to prevent this before becomes
> an issie it's a good idea.  I would like to propose to have a simple
> text file on octave.org with this info. 1 line with package names and
> their URLs would suffice. This would also make the code to get
> packages from forge simpler since the parsing would also be simpler.
> 
> Any comments?
> 
> Carnë

Sounds like a good idea to me.  Should there also be a way to locally over-ride 
the web-site to allow packages not on OF to be installed automatically?  
Perhaps a local list of repositories/mirrors that can be successively searched 
for the desired package?

Ben