From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Sat Jan 4 23:29:14 2003 Subject: mkpkgadd From: Paul Kienzle To: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2003 00:29:21 -0500 Hi, I've started adding PKGADD stuff to octave-forge. (1) The simplist thing to do is use mkpkgadd directly from octave. Obviously I will need to put in my own copy for this release, but shouldn't mkpkgadd be added to /usr/local/bin, or maybe /usr/local/libexec/octave-2.1.xx/exec/arch-xxx assuming octave-config can report the location of the exec path to the makefile? (2) oct-file functions may also need PKGADD stuff --- either for my as yet unfinished type dispatch stuff or for marking them as text commands. But mkpkgadd operates on the installed directory, not on the source directory, so any PKGADD stuff would be lost. Should the PKGADD file act more like a database which can replace the directives associated with a file when you install a new file in the directory? Or should I create a file such as .add which mkpkgadd automatically concatenates when it builds the PKGADD file? Presumably .add would be built automatically by somthing like mkpkgadd which scans the C++, C and Fortran files for ## PKGADD directives. We will need something similar to process embedded test cases. And the same for help strings. That way we wouldn't have to embed them in string constants, but instead say ## HELP followed by the help string. We could almost do this now using document, except that document is associated with actual symbols in the symbol table, not ones that we promise will be there. Hmmm...., how could we get spfind, the find function which works for sparse [which will eventually be dispatched on find when the first argument is a sparse matrix], to add a blurb to the help description for find saying that it also works on sparse matrices? document_add(x,text) maybe? Paul Kienzle pkienzle at users dot sf dot net