Re: Relocatable packages?

[poti]

On 14:48 Fri 15 Jun     , David Bateman wrote:
> Benjamin Lindner wrote:
> > In the process of putting the pieces for the mingw32 build together
> > I stumbled over the fact that apparently octave itself is relocatable
> > (provided you keep the directory tree structure) since paths are
> > relative to OCTAVE_HOME, but the packages are not.
> > You must at least call "pkg rebuild" when moving octave
In the post to octave-help where I reported this working, 
(http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2007-June/004167.html)
I only tried octave itself. This tempers, a little, my good cheer from seeing 
the prompt problem possibly solved.

> >
> > I feel that this is an unneccesary restriction, since 
> > 1) you need write access to the octave tree - this way you'll never be 
> > able to run octave e.g. from a cd/dvd, which would be a really cool 
> > feature IMO (something like a "Octave Live")
I was calling the DVD project I have been posting about 'Stat Live,' borrowing 
freely from TeX Live which gave it its start. If we can add 'Octave Live' to 
it, 
it would have to become what? Math Live? Some statisticians would take 
exception. 
Quantitative Live? _Tech Live_.

> 
> So in the end is it better to allow packages to be placed anywhere
> individually or is it better to enforce that they are all under a
> particular directory and make the package paths in the database relative?

R makes it possible to specify multiple package directories. This was
working well for me. R also allows specification of a start directory
per session. In my early instructions for running R from DVD, I was
asking users to move a directory containing initialization files that
set these directories to a writable place on their drive, specifying
that directory as their start directory on launching R, and then installing
packages as needed. They then had the package hierarchy on the DVD and
that on their hard drive. I moved to just having all R packages installed and
available on the DVD to cut down on instructions, but I report this here 
as an illustration of an approach in a program with some similarities to
Octave that worked even with a write only medium. 

> 
> > A "portable octave" would also be a cool feature to have on windows
> > (packaging it completely with a compiler and msys environment and an 
> > editor and forge-packages and ... and all in an "atomic" package that
> > can be moved/copied without the need for installations ...
> > just getting visionary now)
:) We have been using the DVD in some of our statistics classes since
January, when, as far as I can tell, technology, economics, and software 
converged to make this kind of thing possible for the first time. For fall
classes, the 'Tech Live' dvd will be on the hard drives. You will just
click on an Emacs shortcut, and be able to almost forget you are using
Windows.