Re: Curent OF statistics package is broken

[Olaf Till]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 07:24:56AM +0100, Oliver Heimlich wrote:
> 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

JP and Oliver,

sorry for the late reply. In fact the new root level Makefile does
install into a temporary directory, although it was complicated to
implement. This should actually _avoid_ messing up the systems
installation. There is no target to install for your regular use at
your system, this should be done manually by 'pkg install ...'.

JP, I don't understand all what you write. Does the above resolve the
issue? If not, please bear with me and give more detail.

Olaf

-- 
public key id EAFE0591, e.g. on x-hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature