RE: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release

[Billings, Paul]

My .octaverc has the following to configure interactions of my native editor
with octave:
edit editor
'/cygdrive/c/progra~1/xemacs/XEmacs-21.4.13/i586-pc-win32/winclient.exe
`cygpath -msa %s`'

Other editors may require -w instead of -m if they don't grok '/' as a dir
separator.  You can probably get away without the -s (short file names).

I don't think ANY of this rigmarole should be in edit.m.  A note somewhere
about this peculiarity of the cygwin version would be nice (e.g., the wiki),
but I would think that's all.

Paul


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Adler [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 4:53 AM
> To: Bill Denney
> Cc: Doug Stewart; address@hidden
> Subject: Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release
>
>
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Bill Denney wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Andy Adler wrote:
> >
> > > My version is 2.1.42 and is about 4 years old. I'll be changing my
> > > web page to send people to a newer version soon (when the term ends
> > > and I can get a breath)
> >
> > I'm not trying to rush you-- I just prefer for people to see the better
> > features that we have put forward in the newer versions.
> >
> > > OTOH, one advantage of the package I made was that it was very small
> > > (ie <4MB for a complete octave + tools). To get this small size I used
> > > a static link of octave + octave-forge. This niche is still unfilled
> > > in octave for windows installs.
> >
> > It's small, but it's also has significantly fewer features.  I
> would guess
> > that most people would be more interested in having multi-dimensional
> > arrays (as starts I think around 2.1.51) than ~18MB fewer to
> download.  I
> > know that there are parts of the world where download speeds and costs
> > make smaller better, though.
>
> You're right. I may try to do a static build of a 2.9.x version.
>
> > >> Should we just do a special test for /cygdrive/ in the path
> name of the
> > >> editor and return a path with /cygwin (or better-- finding the actual
> > >> directory to cygwin)?
> > >
> > > This is way too complicated and will actually disadvantage the user.
> > > The user should be able to use any editor they like - cygwin or not.
> > >
> > > The correct way is to let the user choose the editor (via the EDITOR
> > > variable) during the install process. Then we run it with any '\'
> > > changed to '/'. This will work for *nix or windows.
> > >
> > > ie
> > >   export EDITOR="C:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"
> > >   octave
> >
> > This doesn't fix the problem I was thinking of.  The problem that I was
> > discussing is if you do that it's fine, but if you type
> >
> > edit plot
> >
> > at the octave prompt with an editor that is outside of the cygwin
> > environment (i.e. notepad from your example), it will try to
> edit an empty
> > file because the path it will be passed is
> >
> > \usr\share\octave\2.1.73\plot\plot.m
> >
> > while notepad can't find a file there, it can find the file it's looking
> > for at
> >
> > c:\cygwin\usr\share\octave\2.1.73\plot\plot.m
> >
> > (I didn't specifically check the path to plot, so the path may be wrong,
> > but the statement is generally true).
> >
> > Essentially we would need to check if the editor is outside the cygwin
> > environment then we may need to mangle the path to show correctly for
> > being called from outside cygwin.
>
> The cygwin utility to do this is cygpath.exe
>
> so you can do
>     system('cygpath -msa /usr/share/octave/2.1.73/plot/plot.m')
> to get
>     c:/cygwin/usr/share/octave/2.1.73/plot/plot.m
>
> There are different switches for different slashes. If cygpath
> doesn't exist, then we can assume that we're not on a cygwin
> system.
> --
> Andy Adler <address@hidden> 1(613)562-5800x6218
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.
>
> Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
> How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
> Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
> -------------------------------------------------------------



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------