From maintainers-request at octave dot org Sat Jan 28 09:43:43 2006
Subject: Re: "light-weight" build of Octave for Nokia 770
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: "Frederick (Rick) A Niles" <fniles at mitre dot org>
Cc: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:42:25 -0500

While a slim Octave would be nice, it would require
a significant restructuring of the octave codebase.

There are some easy things to do such as splitting up
liboctave so that e.g., if you do not want to supply the fft
function in your slim octave you can simply leave out the
fft.oct file.

The harder task is dropping some of the octave types.
Currently individual functions which work on multiple
types (e.g., sort) have a dispatch in the function itself
to decide which type it is working with.  These would have
to be moved to use a type-based dispatcher which calls
a different function specialized for each type.

The octave base class would need to be restructured so that
it has no particular knowledge of the various types, which
means methods like int8_array_value can't be part of the
base class.  Similarly for load/save.

Not impossible, but I don't imagine anyone is going to
invest the time to do this.

- Paul

On Jan 27, 2006, at 7:46 PM, Frederick (Rick) A Niles wrote:

> I got a Nokia 770 about a week ago and I'm really digging it.  It runs
> Linux and got all sorts of extra goodies like xterm, ssh, vpnc other 
> fun
> stuff.
>
> Anyway, I'd love to put Octave on it as sort of a super-nerd 
> calculator.
> The only thing that scares me off is the size of Octave.   Has anyone
> done any work on a reduced octave that might not have all the
> features?
>
> Just the RPM for octave weights in at 20MB and that doesn't include all
> the dependences. Just liboctinterp.so is 8MB! Anyone out there try for
> an octave-lite?  Is this a silly idea?
>
> -----
> BTW, two other things while I've got your attention:
>
> (1) "octave.org" doesn't resolve to "www.octave.org". Me thinks this
> should be fixed.
>
> (2) It seems, I never finished implementing dotted and dashed lines in
> __pltopt1__.m  However, I tried looking at it after 10 years and I
> couldn't quickly figure out the gnuplot syntax.  Anyone else interested
> in making it work?  You can look at the code, but basically:
>   "--" would be dashed lines
>   "-." would be dash-dot lines
>   "-:" would be dotted lines.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Rick Niles.
>