Re: private functions in the core Octave distribution

[Søren Hauberg]

tir, 01 12 2009 kl. 22:53 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
> I was about to make the __additional_help_message__, __makeinfo__, and
> __strip_html_tags__ functions from the scripts/help directory private,
> but then noticed that some Octave Forge scripts call __makeinfo__
> directly.  

Yes, '__makeinfo__' is used in the 'generate_html' package, that we plan
on using for generating the Octave-Forge web pages (this was my
motivation for rewriting the help system into m-files). If you would
like to make the '__makeinfo__' function private then I can just work
around this by adding the corresponding 'private' directory to the path.
I guess this would be acceptable as the 'generate_html' package is
targeted at developers (package maintainers), so I guess they can live a
few hacks here and there...

> I don't see any uses of __strip_html_tags__, so maybe that should be
> deleted from Octave?

It's being used in 'help'. Matlab supports html help texts for
developers who want to format the help text (poor Matlab users don't
even have texinfo support...). The current help system supports this in
the sense that html tags are just removed from the help text before it
is displayed.

Soren