Re: packaging system

[Søren Hauberg]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 17-Jun-2005, Søren Hauberg wrote:
>
> | Just to get things started I've created a quick-and-dirty 
> | implementation, of a *simple* packaging system. The system is basicly 
> | stolen from the R project, but the implementation is in the Octave 
> | language. A bit more details and the code is at 
> | http://hauberg.org/octave-package/
>
> I looked at your sample package and installation script and here are
> some comments.
>
>   * I think the tar file should unpack into a single directory with
>     the name PACKAGE-VERSION.  I'm always annoyed when I unpack a tar
>     file and it dumps a bunch of files directly into my current
>     directory.  Usually I check to see what will happen first with
>     "tar tzf" but I sometimes forget)
Since the user shouldn't unpack the tgz (the install script does that), 
this shouldn't be a big deal. The reason why I haven't done it is that 
until the DESCRIPTION file is read PACKAGE and VERSION are unknown. It 
should however be trivial to change. I'll look into it.

>   * The file COPYING should be the full text of the license, not just
>     the text that goes at the head of each source file.
Right! Since this is just a sample, I took the first "license-looking" 
thing I could find.

>   * Should we also provide scripts for creating packages and verifying
>     that they are complete?
I'm thinking yes! It shouldn't be that hard. I guess there should be a 
script to create a binary package from a source package as this would 
make whings easier for some people (e.g. linux distributers).

/Søren
> Thanks,
>
> jwe