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What manual says about installing packages


From: John Murdie
Subject: What manual says about installing packages
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:15:29 +0000

The Octave manual says in
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Administrating-Packages.html#Administrating-Packages
 that if the package installer is the Unix superuser (root user), that "the 
packages will be installed in a system-wide directory that defaults to 
OCTAVE_HOME/share/octave/packages/". I happen to have installed Octave 3.2.3 as 
user "bin", so ran Octave as 'bin' and gave the Octave command shown on that 
page to confirm this:

> current_installation_directory = pkg prefix

and saw:

> parse error:
> 
>   syntax error
> 
> >>> current_installation_directory = pkg prefix
                                          ^
shouldn't the manual say:

> current_installation_directory = pkg("prefix")

etc? That shows me:

current_installation_directory = /bin/octave

Looking in $OCTAVE/share/octave, I see:

> 3.2.3  site

but no 'packages' directory.

I suppose these to be known out-of-date pages in the manual (I'm an
Octave beginner), but I thought I should mention them here.

Thinking perhaps the correct default value for
current_installation_directory should actually be 'share/octave/site', I
commanded (expanding $OCTAVE):

> pkg prefix $OCTAVE/share/octave/site
> ans = $OCTAVE/share/octave/site

Unfortunately, when I then try:

> pkg install nnet-0.1.10.tar.gz

I see the messages:

> warning: load_path: $OCTAVE/share/octave/site/nnet-0.1.10: No such file or 
> directory
> fwrite: invalid stream number = -1
> error: called from `__makeinfo__' in file 
> $OCTAVE/share/octave/3.2.3/m/help/__makeinfo__.m near line 128, column 5
> error: called from:
> error:   $OCTAVE/share/octave/3.2.3/m/pkg/pkg.m at line 756, column 5
> error:   $OCTAVE/share/octave/3.2.3/m/pkg/pkg.m at line 287, column 7

(I've substituted '$OCTAVE' for the Octave installation root path to
keep things simple.)

What have I misunderstood in all this, please?

Incidentally, is there any more obvious means of searching the Octave
Mailing List Archive than Googling (or equivalent) with
"site:www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/ (search term(s) go(es)
here)"?

John A. Murdie


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