Re: Octave 3.6.1 mingw for windows - updated

[Carnë Draug]

On 5 April 2012 15:59, Lukas Reichlin <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 05.04.2012, at 15:34, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>> 2012/4/5 Sébastien Villemot <address@hidden>:
>>> During the installation it is possible to only install Octave without
>>> the Octave-Forge packages (by unclicking a checkbox).
>>
>> People are basically illiterate. They don't care what they're
>> installing or why. They just want "everything". They need a little
>> guidance here.
>>
>>> From my point of view, if the user installs the Octave-Forge packages,
>>> he expects them to be autoloaded. At least this is the policy that we
>>> adopted in the Debian Octave Group.
>>
>> Debian users have a habit to pay attention to what they're installing
>> and will complain loudly if packages they don't recognise are being
>> installed. Windows users have the habit of
>> "next->next->I-agree->next->next->done".
>
> Jordi, I don't quite get it. Why do you want users to type "pkg load" every 
> time if they chose to install the packages? As long as the packages don't 
> shadow core functions, they can be loaded permanently. Otherwise, people try 
> to use package functions and wonder why octave doesn't find them. That's 
> confusing to me. And you don't have to load matlab toolboxes either. So 
> what's the reason behind non-autoloading?

I personally don't like that packages to be autoloaded as I see it as
polluting the namespace. In perl and python, you also need to load the
modules as you need them, the interpreter doesn't assume you want them
just because they are installed.

Plus, they want the package loaded because they installed it... I
don't think that's always true as they might have it installed for use
a few times but may actually rarely need it.

Carnë