Re: Funding - Specifically identifying allocations

[Paul Kienzle]

On Sep 28, 2005, at 11:35 AM, David Bateman wrote:

> Søren Hauberg wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > > Related question:  We had a plan to develop a system for delivering 
> > > add-on packages for Octave.  This would complement Octave-Forge.  
> > > How is that coming along?
> >
> > Well, I guess I should answer that one. The package system should be 
> > done, but I haven't had the time to port octave-forge (I need to 
> > learn the autotools first). So status is that I think it's done, but 
> > it hasn't gone through the large test of porting octave-forge.
>
> Soren,
>
> I don't think you should port "octave-forge", just a single toolbox 
> would be a good proof.. The major problem I see is not autoconf 
> per-se, but rather the large amount of cruft for earlier versions of 
> octave.. The autoconf stuff is effectively there to identify the needs 
> of the version of octave for which octave is being built, with a very 
> small component there to check for particular libraries that might be 
> needed (cf. gmp/cln/ginac for the symbolic toolbox).. The cruft in 
> autoconf you can ignore, and its only the external dependencies that 
> need to be treated (ie we're targeting only the very latest and 
> probably only the 2.9.x octave tree). If you pick the signal toolbox 
> there are no external dependencies and so after decrufting of the 
> code, it might be packaged without autoconf... A good test case that 
> would need autoconf is the image toolbox that needs libpng and jpeg-6b 
> installed, and a relatively simple autoconf will suffice for that.. 
> Once the process is in place with those two examples, the rest of 
> octave-forge might follow very rapidly...

David,

There are many packaging challenges in octave-forge including the ones 
that you mention above.

Here are some of the issues we will encounter:

* main/signal has compiled components
* main/image has library dependencies
* main/vrml has external program dependencies
* main/audio installs a complementary binary and sample data
* main/gsl has generated code
* extra/mex and extra/engine installs headers and libs
* main/comm has texinfo documentation
* extra/graceplot installs as an 'alternative'
* extra/MacOSX is OS dependent
* extra/NaN wants to install in octave or matlab

There are many cross cutting concerns as well:

* removing cruft from old octave versions
* dependencies between packages
* categorical indexing
* automatic running of embedded tests
* PKG_ADD tags

By the time octave-forge is chunked and packaged, the install will have 
pretty good coverage of the features it needs.

- Paul



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