From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Wed May 21 12:16:48 1997
Subject: Re: octave version
From: Doug Warner <warnerd at trinidad dot cs dot dartmouth dot edu>
To: jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
CC: Andreas dot Weingessel at ci dot tuwien dot ac dot at, octave-maintainers@bevo.che.wisc.edu
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 13:16:39 -0400 (EDT)


> | In our current configuration it is not possible to have both version
> | installed at the same time, so we have to decide for one of these two
> | versions.
> 
> Even though the version number is included in several places when
> installing Octave, I know that it's not really enough to allow
> multiple versions to actually be correctly installed at the same
> time.  Until that is properly fixed, you can use
> 
>   configure --prefix=/usr/local/octave/2.0.5.90
>   configure --prefix=/usr/local/octave/ss-970430
> 
> and so on.  Then you can change your path to selet the version you
> want, or create some symbolic links in /usr/local to set up a default
> version.

Actually, the configure script seems to handle --exec-prefix
correctly, but it doesn't really fit with installing multiple
versions.  Nonetheless, I used it to keep multiple versions from
clashing:

./configure --prefix=/usr/gnu --exec-prefix=/usr/gnu/octave-2.0.5

It worked, although the paths aren't that great.

> If someone has the time to look into it, it would be nice if we could
> come up with a directory structure that will actually work for people
> who want to keep multiple versions installed.  I think the $prefix/lib
> and $prefix/include/octave directories are still problems, but there
> may be others.

Just using $prefix/lib/octave/$version for the first case would work.
Correctly handling multiple versions of .oct files takes more work.
You'd probably need to include version information with every shared
library used by octave and make sure that the run-time system
indicates an error if the .oct file was created with a different
version of the shared libraries in mind.  I think that's not too hard
on DEC Unix, but I don't know about other systems.  To handle the
include files, something like $prefix/include/octave-$version/octave/*.h
should be fairly transparent.
 
There's also $prefix/bin/octave-bug, which has version specific info.

Doug Warner