Re: Package manager under Win32/MSVC

[David Bateman]

Michael Goffioul wrote:
> - "issuperuser" does not work under Win32, as this function simply
> checks the username against "root" (too UNIX-specific); as my
> intention was to install packages system-wide (to build a Win32
> installer), I just short-circuited the check

This makes the assumption that the user has write access to the
system-wide directories. It might make sense to add a "-local" flag to
pkg, that forces a local installation even if "issuperuser" returns
true, as in that way even unprivileged users on Windows might install
packages..

> - regexp cannot deal correctly with backslahes in path if they are not
> doubled; as it's only a matter of checking th existence of a string within
> another, I replaced all \ with /

You used double-quoted strings (ie "").. Use single-quote (ie '')
strings and the \ characters aren't interpreted. This is recommended
under windows systems for path names :-)

> 
> Finally, the package manager also relies on some hacks in the glob
> library (will be included in the Win32 package) to make it work correctly
> with backslashes. It also requires the MSYS and MinGW bin directories
> available in PATH (which relaxes the changes required on octave-side).

Disk is cheap. BTW does this include the gnu compilers? Can they
interact with MSVC and mkoctfile so as not to need MSVC installed?

Regards
David