[Pkg-octave-devel] Re: Api-versioned directories in Octave

[Rafael Laboissiere]

* John W. Eaton <jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu> [2005-02-19 11:31]:

> I guess it is a holdover from having version-specific directories.
> Maybe that doesn't matter for the site directory tree now.  I'm not
> sure.  What should we have?  An api for the .oct files, nothing
> special for the site directory?  All of this version/api stuff was
> intended to allow multiple versions of Octave to be installed at
> once.  To do that might require site directories for each version (or
> api), even for .m files because there could be incompatible changes in
> the language.

This brings me back to my original question: is the api-version number
related to loadable modules only or also to the Octave language itself?

> Maybe for simplicity we should drop all the version/api-specific
> directories.  Installing multiple versions simultaneously is still
> possible by using --prefix=/usr/local/octave-VERSION (or similar) as a
> configure option (and it may be the best way to do this sort of thing
> anyway, because then removing a particular version is as simple as an
> rm -rf /usr/local/octave-VERSION).

I personally like the api-specific directory for .oct files and I am planing
to use them for the Debian packages.  Using it instead of the
version-specific directory will avoid incompatibilities among packages for
every new version of Octave released.  Packages will need rebuild only when
the api-version number bumps.  Of course, this is no absolute guarantee that
pacakges will work across different versions of Octave, but this would be
better than our current situation in Debian.

In sum, I would vote for keeping the api-specific directory(ies).

-- 
Rafael