From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Dec 27 14:29:07 2002
Subject: Re: changes to path searching
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at jazz dot ncnr dot nist dot gov>
To: octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2002 15:28:10 -0500

On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 11:35:45PM -0600, John W. Eaton wrote:
> I've just checked in some changes that make Octave's path searching
> behave more like Matlab.  Instead of searching for the entire
> directory tree for .oct files, then searching again for .m files,
> Octave now searches for .oct or .m files (in that order) in each
> directory in the path.  This means that you can now create a .m file
> that overrides a .oct file, provided that the .m file is located in a
> directory that appears in the LOADPATH before the directory containing
> the .oct file.  Previously, the .oct file would always be found
> because Octave would search first for .oct files, then .m files.

What happens if for example you have logm and sqrtm in the same
oct-file on the system path and you put an m-file logm before it
on the path?  Do you still search through the loaded oct-files
before checking the path?  If that's the case, then you will get
different behaviour depending on whether you call sqrtm before or
after logm.  

I guess this is not a new problem --- if for example you have
an oct-file version of sqrtm on your octave-forge path, then you
better be sure to have an oct-file version of logm beside it so
that you don't get different behaviour depending on whether you
call sqrtm before or after logm.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at users dot sf dot net