Re: packaging system

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Jun-2005, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| Just to get things started I've created a quick-and-dirty 
| implementation, of a *simple* packaging system.

I also noticed that your install script has

    ## Get the prefix of the installation directory
    # XXX: The user should be able to change this, through a variable
    # XXX: Should we check that this directory exist?
    prefix = "~/Dokumenter/Octave/package";
    prefix = tilde_expand(prefix);

I think we should be using octave_config_info to get the values of the
variables

  localapifcnfiledir
  localapioctfiledir
  localarchlibdir
  localfcnfiledir
  localoctfiledir
  localstartupfiledir
  localverarchlibdir
  localverfcnfiledir
  localveroctfiledir

to install package components?  These would work for privileged users
installing files to be shared by all users on a system.  Maybe we
should define another set of directories for installing files for a
particular user?  In that case, maybe installing the entire contents
of a package in a subdirectory of ~/octave is sufficient?  The name of
the top-level directory should be configurable, of course.  Perhaps
refuse to install if the user hasn't set it in some way?  I think this
is what the perl CPAN module does.

jwe