Re: [OctDev] A few (Octave) ideas

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi

tor, 03 06 2010 kl. 14:33 -0400, skrev Jake:
> Naturally, I've got a couple of questions:
>  
> 1. Is there a reason why these functions haven't already been
> implemented?  Lack of information on the algorithms, perhaps?
> 2. Is the maintainer of OdePkg (Thomas Treichl) already working on
> implementing these functions?  I'd like to help, if possible.
> 3. Are there any reasons why I shouldn't try to implement these
> functions?

I'll let Thomas reply here, as he really is the expert.

> I've also got another idea concerning packages.  I was reading through
> the Octave manual the other day and saw the various difference pkg
> functions and urlwrite.  Anyway, to cut to the chase, I think it'd be
> very useful and very easy to implement an extra pkg option to
> automatically download and install Octave-Forge packages.  We could
> keep a small text file on one of the Octave sites containing package
> names along with their dependencies and download URLs.  The new
> function would download this file, parse it, and then do nothing more
> than download packages with urlwrite and install them with pkg install
> (as well as ensuring that dependent packages are installed first).
> It'd be awesome if you could take a fresh install of Octave and simply
> type in something like 'pkg get vrml'.  I'd LOVE to program this much
> at least and would like to hear what all of your thoughts are on such
> an idea.

This idea has been discussed previously, but nothing came of it.
Basically, somebody needs to do the actual implementation.

Two potential issues:

     1. Security. I don't know the first thing about security, so all I
        can say is that you need to ensure that the user doesn't end up
        downloading and running malicious code.
     2. Technically, I guess we don't have an official package
        repository. In practice Octave-Forge serves this purpose, but I
        don't believe this is the official policy. If we are to change
        'pkg' (which is part of Octave core) to download packages from
        Octave-Forge, then this would very much be a blessing of
        Octave-Forge. I don't know if that would be a good thing or not,
        but it would change the relationship between the two projects.

That being said, it is a feature I would like to see implemented.

Soren