packaging system

[Stefan van der Walt]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 02:08:06PM -0400, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On a related topic, it would be useful to have a packaging system for
> contributed Octave code.  That would allow people to independently
> distribute collections of functions.  Octave forge would still be
> useful as a place for collaborative deveoplment, but we would not be
> restricted to a monolithic Octave plus a monolithic Octave forge
> collection.  Given a functioning package system, there are a number of
> things that could be removed from Octave and placed in independent
> packages.

I suggest that we take a look at the Debian package format, and create
a similarly structured archive.  This archive will, for example,
contain the following:

pre-install.m
post-install.m
pre-remove.m
post-install.m
content.tar
INDEX

Then, some choice functions could be provided to aid the pre- and
post-install/remove scripts.  The INDEX format used in Octave Forge
works quite well -- and we already have a parser for it, written in
C++.

Regards
Stéfan