Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release

[Bill Denney]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Doug Stewart wrote:

> I have used this release, and I like it!
> I will be using this now for my students instead of Andy Adler's 2.1.14 
> version.

It will be nice to have them have a more recent version.  It probably 
wasn't good advertising for us if they have a version that old.

> One small problem is the edit.m that comes with Octave forge does not 
> work in windows. I have modified this edit.m (using ideas from Andy 
> Adler's version)  so that it now works in windows with Agustin's 2.1.73 
> version. You can get it here www.dougs.homeip.net/octave/edit.m
>
> We need to have some way of having this new version of edit.m show up in 
> the windows release. Is this the responsibility of the packager?

The way to get code to show up in the release is to submit a diff relative 
to the current CVS sources (see http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=2888 
for how to get the CVS).

Octave is written to be cross platform (generally), from what I can tell, 
your code makes changes that are not good for cross platform 
functionality.  If you could modify the code in such a way that it will 
work both for you and for others on other operating systems, it is much 
more likely to be accepted.

There are several changes that you made that would not be very portable. 
I tried to fix edit in a different way (and I fixed several problems in 
the attached diff), but there are also some problems that will be hard to 
fix in a cross platform manner (and they may require special code).

The problem that I see is that if I invoke a windows based editor (in my 
case I was trying to use emacs for windows in "c:/program 
files/emacs/bin/runemacs.exe"), I will receive a path with just /usr/... 
instead of /cygwin/usr/...

Should we just do a special test for /cygdrive/ in the path name of the 
editor and return a path with /cygwin (or better-- finding the actual 
directory to cygwin)?

Bill

Changelog

2006-03-28  Bill Denney <address@hidden>

        * main/miscellaneous/edit.m: handle editor paths with spaces more
        correctly (for both the editor itself and the file path), also use
        the filesep variable instead of /

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edit.diff
Description: Text document