Re: Package system

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-Oct-2005, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| I just updated the code to include some documentation. You can get it
| from http://hauberg.org/octave-package/package-0.2.1.tgz

This looks good so far.  Thanks for working on it.

I have a few comments:

  * I recently modified rmdir to accept an optional second argument
    ("s") which if present tells rmdir to work recursively (this
    choice was for compatibility; I guess the "s" means
    "subdirectories too"), so we shouldn't need the rm_rf.m file.

  * We probably need something different from the issuperuser
    function, which checks to see if the environment variable USER has
    a value of "root".  That's probably not a good test.  It's likely
    to fail on Windows systems (Cygwin or MinGW).  Even on Unixy
    systems it would miss the case of an additional user name with a
    UID of 0.

    Checking for root is maybe not the right thing anyway.  We just
    want to know whether we can install files in Octave's site
    directory.  That's a function of more than just being root.  Maybe
    we should do something like

      use_system_dir = false;
      fs = stat (system_dir);
      if (S_ISDIR (fs.mode))
        ## Directory exists.  Can we create a file there?
        tfile = strcat (system_dir, filesep, "foo");
        fid = fopen (tfile, "w");
        if (fid > 0)
          ## We can write files in existing directory, so we should be
          ## able to use it.
          use_system_dir = true;
          fid = fclose (tfile);
          unlink (tfile);
        endif
      else if (mkdir (system_dir))
        ## Directory did not exist, but we were able to create it, so
        ## we should be able to use it.
        use_system_dir = true;
      endif

    (This code will only work with recent CVS Octave due to changes in
    the way mkdir works and the use of S_ISDIR.)

  * We should make the untar function compatible with Matlab's untar
    function and include it with Octave.  (Maybe implement the tar,
    zip, unzip, gzip, and gunzip functions at the same time.)

  * The remaining functions currently have the following names

      installed_packages.m
      load_packages.m
      uninstall.m
      get_unsatisfied_deps.m
      install.m

    Maybe we should have just one command?

      pkg -list
      pkg -install -nodeps pkg-name ...
      pkg -uninstall nodeps pkg-name ...
      pkg -require pkg-name ...

    or multiple names, but all starting with pkg:

      pkg_list
      pkg_install
      pkg_uninstall
      pkg_require (or pkg_load)

    If the get_unsatisfied_deps is not intended to be called by
    users, then it should have a name like __pkg_uninstalled_deps__.

Thanks,

jwe