Re: Missing functions in the statistics package.

[Dag]

Oliver Heimlich wrote
> When you plan to contribute to the source code, you should not get the 
> source tarball, but clone the source repository into a local workspace. 
> You will then be able to create patches for the maintainers. If you make 
> changes to version 3.8.2, it might become impossible to apply them to 
> the upcoming 4.2.0.
> 
> If you are only contributing to packages, you could install any 
> reasonably recent octave version, preferably from the package 
> repositories of your distribution.

I ran "hg clone http://www.octave.org/hg/octave"; from 
http://wiki.octave.org/Talk:Build_from_source
<http://wiki.octave.org/Talk:Build_from_source>  . I came across a couple of
errors, but they were already solved, so there is nothing to report. I ran
"make check", "make install" and "make installcheck" successfully.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> Again, if you plan to make changes to the packages, it is much easier to 
> clone the source repository and export patches. There have been several 
> changes to the source code since the 1.2.4 release of the statistics 
> package.

I cloned the source of statistics as follows: "pkg install -forge -local
statistics".


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> When you have a local clone of the package's repository, you can use 
> `make run` to experiment with the package without (re-)installing all 
> the time. Whether `make run` is available for a particular package 
> depends, but the statistics package has it.

Not sure how that works.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> You could push your modified version to a private repository or provide 
> patches for the official repository. Later it will be possible to grant 
> push access to the official repository if you plan more substantial 
> contributions.

OK.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> You should file a bug report for octave, unless the error is already 
> known or caused by some misconfiguration.

Only known bugs, as I said before.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> When you have several octave versions on your machine, you have to 
> export OCTAVE and MKOCTFILE environment variables and make them point to 
> the correct binaries. Otherwise working with the package sources might 
> fail because the wrong mkoctfile version is used in combination with a 
> particular octave version.

I do not know if there is a conflict right now.

I was hoping of being able to use many installations of the same program. If
they are siloed, they will ideally not interfere with each other. (I am a
relative newbie, still learning.) For example, you can have several
installations of gcc and g++ installed from repositories without conflict.

Currently I have the installed Octave 3.8.1 from the Linux Mint 17.1
repositories, based on Ubuntu 14.04. And then also a local installation of
v. 4.1.0+ from the Mercurial repository. I can control which installation to
launch by using soft links linked to binaries.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> Most of our repositories use mercurial instead of git. You can use 
> whatever editor you prefer. For example you should have mercurial 
> integration in Eclipse. Instead of reinstalling the package, you can use 
> `make run` to see your changes to the source code in action.

I have found tutorials for Mercurial on the Internet.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> Just like `make run` you can use `make check` for some packages. You 
> have to clone the official source repository, because the Makefile is 
> not included in the package tarball.
> 
> To test an installed package, you could use
>  >> pkg load statistics
>  >> __run_test_suite__ ({'octave/statistics-1.2.4/'}, {})
> …
> Summary:
> 
>    PASS       223
>    FAIL        21

Excellent, I can make it work on my installation. I also get 23 fails.


Oliver Heimlich wrote
> If you implement a function that is also available in matlab or one of 
> its toolboxes, you should make sure that its interface is compatible, so 
> user code can run in octave without much rewriting.

Exactly. I will write function implementations based on the Matlab interface
when possible. Otherwise, I will write my own implementations, and then ask
the Octave community for simplifications or corrections if needed.

The package statistics already contains some of the distributions listed in 
http://wiki.octave.org/Statistics_package
<http://wiki.octave.org/Statistics_package>  , e.g. extreme value
distribution, as can be seen here 
http://octave.sourceforge.net/statistics/overview.html
<http://octave.sourceforge.net/statistics/overview.html>  .

I think that I can know enough to start by now. I am just unsure about how
to use Mercurial. I can see how you write tests in m files so I will just
replicate that.

I hope to write C/C++/Fortran source files later, and that requires more
skill than only editing m files, because you have to recompile and perhaps
reinstall packages before testing.



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