From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Tue Jan  6 18:59:53 2004
Subject: Re: packages (was: benchmarks)
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 19:59:24 -0500


On Jan 6, 2004, at 10:47 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  5-Jan-2004, Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net> wrote:
>
> | BTW, moving more stuff from octave-forge to octave,
> | and providing a CRAN-like list of available packages
> | will help make octave look more complete.  This has
> | to be linked directly from the octave home page so that
> | people can find it.
>
> Agreed.  It would help if someone with some experience with packaging
> systems could help design and possibly implement something for
> Octave.  I don't think it needs to be complicated, and doesn't have to
> handle binary packages.  If you want to install a package that uses
> .oct files, then I think it is OK to expect that you will have to
> build them when you install the package.  Anything else will be too
> difficult for us to maintain (too many different
> version/OS/etc. combinations to expect success).

I expect Windows binary packages since most windows systems do
not have a compiler available.  Maybe Mac OS X too for packages that
use fortran.  Unix systems can build their own packages because they
have compilers generally available, assuming the packaging system
knows how to find them.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at users dot sf dot net