[Pkg-octave-devel] Dynare

[Sébastien Villemot]

"Rafael Laboissiere" <rafael at debian.org> a écrit :

> I looked more closely into the package structure.  I think it is possible
> to make two minimal changes in order to get it working out of the box for
> Octave.
>
> The first change regards putting dynare_config in the Octave's.  The
> patch for debian/rules that do this respecting the guidelines of the DOG
> is attached below.

Thanks for having looked closely at the package, and for pointing me  
to the $(MDIR) directory.

Actually dynare_config.m runs no computation, but only does some path  
manipulations. So if I we adopt your suggestion, the user would first  
have to run "dynare_config" once in an Octave session, then do its  
computations using "dynare" (the top-level function).

Another solution would be to directly put dynare.m in $(MDIR), which  
would allow users to run Dynare with one command instead of two.

I think I prefer the second solution, but maybe you have objections to  
that one?

> Second, dynare_config.m must itself be patched in order to have:
>
>   dynareroot = '/usr/lib/dynare/matlab/'
>
> There is another thing that can be improved in the package.  All the .m
> files are installed in /usr/lib/dynare/matlab/.  According to the FHS
> [1], such architecture-independent files must be installed in /usr/share
> instead.  If this is done, the dynare package should be split into a
> dynare package containing the .mex files and a dynare-common package with
> arch:all containing the .m files.  This is done with octave3.0 and
> octave3.0-common, BTW.

Both of these changes are already done. The only arch-independent file  
which is still in the main "dynare" package is  
/usr/lib/dynare/mex/octave/rcond.m, which is meant to provide a rough  
replacement for "rcond" which is present in Matlab but not in Octave  
3.0 (I think it will be in Octave 3.2). Maybe should I move this file  
to $(MDIR) ? (I don't want it in /usr/share/dynare/matlab because of   
Matlab users, and putting it into /usr/share/dynare/mex/octave makes  
no real sense)

All the best,

-- 
Sébastien Villemot