From maintainers-request at octave dot org Thu Mar 10 12:42:27 2005
Subject: Re: mkoctfile at Octave command prompt?
From: Todd Neal <tolchz at gmail dot com>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
CC: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:46:01 -0600

John W. Eaton wrote:
> I've now seen several instances of people thinking that they should
> run mkoctfile at the Octave prompt instead of the shell prompt.
> Perhaps this is partly because Matlab has a "mex" command.
> 
> Does anyone have strong opinions about whether we should or should not
> provide an Octave command called mkoctfile?

I see it as a possibly useful addition.  I haven't looked at the 
particular Octave internals but I believe at one point someone mentioned 
that time stamps are checked when a function is called, so a compile 
from within octave would make the next function invocation reload the 
newly compiled .oct.

This would prevent the only possible downside that I see of a .oct being 
compiled and then the old one being used.  Perhaps automatically loading 
any .oct after compilation from within Octave would make sense as well. 
  There are probably not many times that someone would compile from 
within Octave and then not use the object that was compiled.

Todd