From bug-request at octave dot org Tue Mar 21 09:33:53 2006
Subject: Re: Problems with MingW
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Bill Denney <denney at seas dot upenn dot edu>
Cc: David dot Bateman at motorola dot com, bugs@octave.org
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:33:42 -0500

On 21-Mar-2006, Bill Denney wrote:

| David Bateman wrote:
| > I'm not sure what Sebastien did but for me it should be under
| > "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>". It should be easy enough to
| > adapt where this and the .octave_hist file are  found, though it might
| > need a patch to octave itself.. I'll try to do something after the 2.9.5
| > release to put it in Application\Data\Octave..
| >   
| Actually, after further consideration, what I think would be more 
| helpful would be for octave to use an environmental variable (I'd think 
| OCTAVERC):
| 
| * If the variable didn't exist, then use some default location 
| (~/.octaverc in a unix-y OS, or %APPDATA%\Octave\.octaverc in windows).

There are three rc files that Octave looks for.  Two are system-wide and
the other is per-user.  The system-wide files are located in the
directories specified by

  octave_config_info ("startupfiledir")
  octave_config_info ("localstartupfiledir")

The prefix for these may be modified by the $OCTAVE_HOME environment
variable (useful if you decide to move your installation of Octave to
a directory tree other than the one specified by --prefix at configure
time).

The other is supposed to go in $HOME/.octaverc, so I think it belongs
in the home directory of the user, even on a Windows system.  I don't
think we need another environment variable for this.

| * If the variable is a file (or I suppose if whatever the variable 
| references doesn't exist), then use that file.

| * If the variable is a directory, then read each file in the directory 
| in lexicographic order (i.e. sort(readdir(getenv('OCTAVERC')))) and 
| execute them in that order.

If you want to implement something like this for a particular package
on a particular syste, you may, as it can all be implemented in one of
the system-wide rc files.  But I don't think this extra complexity
belongs in Octave itself.

jwe



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