Re: Curent OF statistics package is broken

[Oliver Heimlich]

Am 20. März 2018 16:01:47 MEZ schrieb JuanPi <address@hidden>:
>Hi all (I guess this is mainly Olaf),
>
>The current repository version of the statistics packages completely
>fails to install in my system, and the Makefile makes a lot of
>assumptions about my workflow that are wrong.
>
>1. It doesn't install the functions from octave core, this makes e.g.
>violin function to fail. I can give more detailed information ot help
>you fix this for my system. But why not just install those functions?
>Why the extra complexity? It seems unjustified to me.
>
>Also, the install option for make is ignoring my octaverc file where I
>define the places where packages should go (yes, it just polluted my
>home folder!). Why would you do this?
>
>In the same line why do set the "run" with no history and norc! If I
>am testing the package I want to do it in my usual octave environment!
>
>I am sure you have a very professional justifications for all this,
>but it just doesn't work here. I am not a professional developer and I
>can't see why I should spend more effort to just stick to somebody
>else workflow.
>
>I strongly suggest we stick to simpler more user-friendly makefiles
>like the one in signal.
>And we need to release this package soon!
>
>Regards,

Hi Juan,

last week I have tried to simplify the Makefile in the interval package, so I 
can answer some of the questions.

Regarding the install option, there are at least two reasons why it is 
implemented with --no-rc:

1. The current Makefile tries to detect whether a new install is actually 
required and only reinstalls the package if the tarball has been modified. The 
main reason for this is performance since "pkg install" can take some time if 
there are oct-files to be compiled. To detect whether reinstall is required, 
the Makefile checks the default package installation directory. To check a 
custom directory, the Makefile had to query Octave for your local prefix, which 
is not implemented for simplicity. You can add this detection, but be prepared 
that execution of make would probably take 1-2 seconds longer.

2. Reproducibility. The install target is only needed for generating the HTML 
for release on Octave Forge. With the --no-rc option we make sure that the 
package can be installed on a vanilla Octave setup. We may drop the option, but 
then the package maintainer has to be very careful with the .octaverc during 
development to not oversee errors worked around with the custom settings.

I have tried to use a temporary pkg install directory in the Makefile, but that 
became very complicated since other packages would still be needed from the 
default directory (generate_html, doctest, other dependencies).

Regarding the run target, I don't see a reason to use no-history and no-rc. 
Maybe this has just been copy-pasted for no particular reason. 

Oliver