Re: Integrating Quint into the Octave sources

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Apr-2011, Judd Storrs wrote:

| On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 2:47 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
| 
|     I also don't think it should cause trouble for users if they are able
|     to start Octave with a --no-gui option, or allow them to put some
|     equivalent function call in their ~/.octaverc file.  But once the GUI
|     is sufficiently usable, I see no reason to disable it by default.  And
|     it makes no sense to me that it should be a separate program.  We
|     don't have emacs-tty and emacs-gtk, we just have emacs and a -nw
|     switch to tell it to not start the GUI code.  I think Octave should
|     work the same way.
| 
| 
| What about shebang use? Is it possible for octave to detect it's loading from 
a
| shebang script and automatically infer that GUI is unwanted? I don't mind
| updating my scripts, but it would be nice if that use was compatible across
| releases.

Yes, it should be possible to disable the GUI by default if you are
executing a script, either by using #! or by passing a script name as
the last command-line argument.  As I recall, these cases are
essentially the same because when the system sees an executable file
beginning with #!, it invokes the named program with arguments and
appends the name of the script file as the final command line
argument.

Look at octave.cc to see the way the current startup process for
Octave works.  To avoid setting up the GUI in this case with the
current sequence of startup events means that the GUI would not be
started until very late in the process.  I don't think that is a
problem, but it may mean that GUI features can't be used from
.octaverc files.  I don't really see that as a problem, but if it is,
then maybe we can work out some other arrangement.  Of course, if you
start Octave with -qf when writing shebang scripts as recommended in
the manual, then the .octaverc files are skipped anyway, so the potential
problem of running any GUI-specific commands there is avoided.

jwe