Re: Autoloading of toolboxes?

[Michael Creel]

David Bateman wrote:
> One major difference between toolboxes installed with pkg and similar
> toolboxes under matlab is the need to explicitly load the toolboxes with
> the "pkg load <package>" or "pkg load all" commands. In matlab an
> installed toolboxes is always available if a license is available. This
> might confuse some users, and so I wonder whether we should include the line
>
> ## PKG_ADD: pkg("load","all");
>
> in pkg.m... Thoughts?
>
> D.

I haven't had a good look at o-f since the switch to the new package system, 
since I'm tied to 2.1.x for the moment, so my apologies in advance if what I say 
is silly. Packages may not really have a single maintainer, and it may be 
doubtful which package to put a given function into. So it may not be clear to 
everyone just which package supplies which functions, and people might miss 
finding useful stuff if they have to know the package/function mapping. Also, 
suppose someone is using a distro that supplies a bunch of packages by default 
whenever Octave is installed. What's the advantage of not automatically loading 
whatever is available?

M.