RE: [OctDev] automatic download of forge packages

[Jake]

So there's still some manual work involved then.  I was envisioning
something more like apt-get on Ubuntu, where it would tell you what main
packages it was going to install, the dependencies it also needs to install,
and finally prompt you to make sure that it's okay to install all of them.
I really don't see a point to this unless it does take care of the
dependencies since pkg install will fail without those dependencies.

I hadn't gotten a chance to implement my idea, but it was like this:

1. There would be a package list containing package names, dependencies and
download URLs in the form of a struct array stored in a .mat file on one of
the Octave servers.  That way it could be loaded easily with no parsing
involved.  This file would be downloaded and loaded first.
2. Check to make sure the supplied package name is in the package list.  If
so, gather the names of all the dependencies needed.
3. See which packages are already installed, can use the struct returned by
(try a=pkg('list') at the prompt).
4. Determine the logical order in which the packages need to be installed so
that all dependencies are met for each installation (this is what I was
stuck on, I wasn't sure how to efficiently do this step).
5. Download and install each package, halting on error.

After seeing a previous email, I was thinking more along the lines of just
making an install script to grab all of the OctaveForge packages for Linux
systems.  Windows already has the OctaveForge packages included in the
installer.

-Jake

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaroslav Hajek [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 7:29 AM
To: Jake
Cc: Octave Maintainers List; octave-forge list
Subject: Re: [OctDev] automatic download of forge packages

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Jake <address@hidden> wrote:
> Does this take care of the required dependencies for each package?
>

No, actually this doesn't anything beyond auto-downloading the current
versions and then just doing normal pkg install.
Currently, pkg is not interactive, and I think that makes it unsuitable for
automatic downloading of dependencies, because implicit automatic downloads
should always be confirmed.

--
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU) Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz