[Pkg-octave-devel] Re: OctavePackaging

[Rafael Laboissiere]

[Cc:ing to pkg-octave-devel.  I think that there may be other people
interested on this discussion]

* Thomas Weber <thomas.weber.mail at gmail.com> [2007-05-11 08:43]:

> I'll describe the current idea I'm following (which is uh 'copied' from the 
> way the Apache webserver configuration is handled in Debian). 
> 
> The packages are built using opkg and then split into arch-dependent (.oct, 
> binaries) and arch-independent (.m, data) stuff in separate directories [2]. 
> These directories are then written into a simple textfile, that is copied in 
> the directory /etc/octave.d/. On startup, Octave reads every file in this 
> directory and adds the directories given there to its loadpath. 
> 
> Now, the problem you sketch above can be handled. In this case, there wouldn't 
> be any file in /etc/octave.d/, but only two subdirectories:
> 	/etc/octave.d/enabled
> 	/etc/octave.d/installed
> Packages installed by dpkg drop their path-file into the installed/ directory. 
> If they are activated by default, they install a symlink to this package in 
> enabled/, otherwise they don't do nothing.

I definitely like this design.  Please go ahead with the implementation.
Also, please add your ideas to our Wiki.

* David Bateman <David.Bateman at motorola.com> [2007-05-11 10:31]:

> Thomas Weber wrote:
> > I'm aware of the meaning of the autoload flag. But in the current state of
> > affairs, opkg won't be used for installing and managing the packages[1].
> > The reason is a Highlander problem ("There Can Be Only One"): in this
> > case, there can be only one package manager.
> 
> How does the debian package of R handle this? In any case unfortunately
> there is not a one to one mapping of opkg to dpkg, as opkg handles the
> issues of loading and unloading both manually and automatically packages
> from the path during the runtime of Octave.

R has a different mechanism for loading libraries (or "modules", or
"packages").  There is a command called "library" that actually put all the
definitions for a given library into the current namespace.  In other words,
a package must be explicitly loaded by the user if she wants to use it.

I hope this answers your question.

-- 
Rafael