Re: help as m-files

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Oct-2008, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| ons, 29 10 2008 kl. 17:26 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
| > | > |   * Perhaps move internal variables (eg 'makeinfo_program') to 
m-files?
| > | > 
| > | > Yes, I think that would be good to do.
| > | 
| > | Okay, I'll make that change then. I was unsure because some of these
| > | internal variables seems to be changeable through command line options
| > | to Octave at startup (e.g. octave --info-file). Is that functionality we
| > | can just drop?
| > 
| > No, I think we should keep those options.  Instead of setting an
| > internal variable, the option handling code can feval the function to
| > reset the persistent variable in the function.  Does that make sense?
| > The action in octave_main may have to be deferred until it is safe to
| > call a function, but that should not be too difficult, I would guess.
| > Probably things like this should be done after the load_path is
| > initialized and just before executing the startup files.
| 
| Sounds a lot more complicated than the current situation. Is it really
| worth it?

Well, I'd rather not lose options that we've had for a long time if we
don't have to.  I can make the change if you would prefer.

| > | > |   * how should 'private' directories be treated in Makefiles ?
| > | > 
| > | > I'm not sure, but we do need to do something for this since there are
| > | > other places where we could use private functions.
| > | 
| > | What I did was just to add 'private/myprivatefile.m' to the SRC list
| > | along with 'myfile.m'. I think that works, but perhaps it's a bit ugly?
| > 
| > Did you try "make install"?  How are the private installation
| > directories created?
| 
| My bad -- sorry. The 'private' directly obviously isn't created, so no
| this doesn't work.

OK, I can try to look at this since we could probably use it for other
directories in the scripts hierarchy as well, but I can't promise when
I'll be able to get to it.

jwe