Re: help as m-files

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Oct-2008, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| I think we should just assume caches are up to date. If we only cache
| files that are distributed with Octave, and files that are installed
| with the package manager, then I think it's fair to assume that these
| caches are up to date. Really, if people change these functions, then I
| doubt that it'll be the help text they're changing. The rest of the
| users functions can just be searched file by file. And if the user
| wants, then (s)he can just generate a cache manually.

OK.

| > | I also have the following on my outstanding-issues-list:
| > | 
| > |   * Perhaps move internal variables (eg 'makeinfo_program') to m-files?
| > 
| > Yes, I think that would be good to do.
| 
| Okay, I'll make that change then. I was unsure because some of these
| internal variables seems to be changeable through command line options
| to Octave at startup (e.g. octave --info-file). Is that functionality we
| can just drop?

No, I think we should keep those options.  Instead of setting an
internal variable, the option handling code can feval the function to
reset the persistent variable in the function.  Does that make sense?
The action in octave_main may have to be deferred until it is safe to
call a function, but that should not be too difficult, I would guess.
Probably things like this should be done after the load_path is
initialized and just before executing the startup files.

| > |   * how should 'private' directories be treated in Makefiles ?
| > 
| > I'm not sure, but we do need to do something for this since there are
| > other places where we could use private functions.
| 
| What I did was just to add 'private/myprivatefile.m' to the SRC list
| along with 'myfile.m'. I think that works, but perhaps it's a bit ugly?

Did you try "make install"?  How are the private installation
directories created?

| > |   * Fix XXX's in code (nothing major).
| > 
| > Please use FIXME instead of XXX as people have complained in the past
| > about patches/mail with XXX being flagged as spam.
| 
| Really? Perhaps it's a feature to flag my code as spam ;-)

Aside from the complaints about spam filtering, I think it is good to
use a consistent style for these so they are easy to find and count.

jwe