From maintainers-request at octave dot org Thu Nov 18 04:26:53 2004
Subject: Re: Octave 2.1.63 available for ftp
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 05:26:41 -0500


On Nov 18, 2004, at 4:03 AM, David Bateman wrote:

>>
>> | I also think version 3.0 should be the release where octave-forge is
>> | decruftified;

That suits me fine.

>> Yes, that would probably be a good thing.  I think it will eventually
>> be too much trouble to try to keep octave-forge compatible with very
>> obsolete versions of Octave.
>
> Yes, the cruft is really beginning to accumulate in octave-forge...
> Some of it is obvious as it is marked with a config option and is easy
> to remove with sed. However, there is code like
>
>   try ar = automatic_replot;
>   catch ar = 0;
>   end
>
>   unwind_protect
>     automatic_replot = 1;
>     ...
>   unwind_protect_cleanup
>     automatic_replot = ar;
>   end_unwind_protect
>
> in quite a few m-files that is less obvious, that should also be 
> cleaned
> up for version 3.0.

A different way of handling whatever flags remain so that you
can harmlessly test and reset them even if they don't exist
would remove the initial if-block.  If in addition the flag
was automatically reset on returning from the function that
would remove the try-catch block. Assuming the special variable
control, the above code reduces to:

	control.automatic_replot = 1;
	...

The implementation should do the correct thing with evalin.  A
more complicated issue is whether the flag should only apply
to the current function, or also to the functions that it calls.

Note that I haven't looked at what flags will remain after
decrufting.  There may be few enough that these extraordinary
efforts are not called for.

- Paul