Re: packaging system

[Paul Kienzle]

On Jun 20, 2005, at 2:40 PM, Søren Hauberg wrote:

> Stefan van der Walt wrote:
> > That's an interesting idea.  Another factor to take into account is
> > that toolboxes are divided into Categories.  The reason we have INDEX
> > files for octave forge is so that we can do classification of the
> > functions.  Quoting from main INDEX file:
> I'm beginning to see why you are so keen on using the INDEX format. 
> The categories seem nice.
> I do however don't like the idea of forcing people to create INDEX 
> files (it seems like a very boring thing to do), so if the INDEX 
> format is to be used I think we should have scripts to auto-generate 
> such files. This should be possible, right?

Being responsible for the initial cut, I can attest to its tedium.  It 
also needs constant maintenance as functions get added and removed.  
The admin/make_index tool on octave-forge warns about unindexed and 
missing functions.

In the absence of an INDEX file for a directory it would be easy to 
treat all indexed functions as belonging to the same category.  You 
need to get the category description from somewhere though.

The INDEX spec allows you to place the same function in multiple 
categories.  E.g., some of the signal processing functions might also 
be useful in image processing, so could be listed twice.  This 
hopefully makes it easier for users to find what they need.  The 
alphabetical list should only list each function once.

You can run make_index in a subdirectory to build a contents.m file in 
the usual Matlab style.  INDEX could be one part of a larger 
documentation system, with detailed docs for each category and tools 
for automatically pulling together the category docs into a complete 
manual.


= {ai;