Re: private functions in the core Octave distribution

[John W. Eaton]

On  2-Dec-2009, S ren Hauberg wrote:

| Yes, '__makeinfo__' is used in the 'generate_html' package, that we plan
| on using for generating the Octave-Forge web pages (this was my
| motivation for rewriting the help system into m-files). If you would
| like to make the '__makeinfo__' function private then I can just work
| around this by adding the corresponding 'private' directory to the
| path.

Hmm.  Shouldn't Octave prevent you from putting the private directory
in the path?  Otherwise, what is the use of having private
directories?  I see that it is currently allowed, but I think Matlab
prohibits it.  I think the Matlab behavior is probably the right thing
here, so we should fix the problem in Octave.

I don't object to having this function be public, except that I think
it should probably have a different name to avoid some confusion.  If
we just call it "makeinfo", people might expect it to simply be a
wrapper around the makeinfo program, but it does something different
from just running makeinfo on a file.

| > I don't see any uses of __strip_html_tags__, so maybe that should be
| > deleted from Octave?
| 
| It's being used in 'help'.

Where?  I did

  find . -type f | xargs grep -l __strip_html_tags__

in the top-level directories of both Octave and Octave Forge and it
only turned up the scripts/help/__strip_html_tags__.m file in the
Octave sources.

jwe