Re: Funding - Specifically identifying allocations

[David Bateman]

Søren Hauberg wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > Related question:  We had a plan to develop a system for delivering 
> > add-on packages for Octave.  This would complement Octave-Forge.  How 
> > is that coming along?
>
> Well, I guess I should answer that one. The package system should be 
> done, but I haven't had the time to port octave-forge (I need to learn 
> the autotools first). So status is that I think it's done, but it 
> hasn't gone through the large test of porting octave-forge.

Soren,

I don't think you should port "octave-forge", just a single toolbox 
would be a good proof.. The major problem I see is not autoconf per-se, 
but rather the large amount of cruft for earlier versions of octave.. 
The autoconf stuff is effectively there to identify the needs of the 
version of octave for which octave is being built, with a very small 
component there to check for particular libraries that might be needed 
(cf. gmp/cln/ginac for the symbolic toolbox).. The cruft in autoconf you 
can ignore, and its only the external dependencies that need to be 
treated (ie we're targeting only the very latest and probably only the 
2.9.x octave tree). If you pick the signal toolbox there are no external 
dependencies and so after decrufting of the code, it might be packaged 
without autoconf... A good test case that would need autoconf is the 
image toolbox that needs libpng and jpeg-6b installed, and a relatively 
simple autoconf will suffice for that.. Once the process is in place 
with those two examples, the rest of octave-forge might follow very 
rapidly...

Decrufting in oct-files will be relatively easy as its just check the 
ifdef'ed code. In the m-files there is also some decrufting needed as 
things like

 try    dfi = do_fortran_indexing;
 catch  dfi = 0;
 end
 try    wfi = warn_fortran_indexing;
 catch  wfi = 0;
 end

 unwind_protect
 ...
 unwind_protect_cleanup
   do_fortran_indexing = dfi;
   warn_fortran_indexing = wfi;
 end_unwind_protect

are pure cruft for older octave versions.... But there is a fair amount 
of that stuff that might not be that easy to find..

Cheers
David

--
David Bateman                                address@hidden
Motorola Labs - Paris                        +33 1 69 35 48 04 (Ph) 
Parc Les Algorithmes, Commune de St Aubin    +33 1 69 35 77 01 (Fax) 
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