Re: Octave-maintainers Digest, Vol 86, Issue 83

[Kai Torben Ohlhus]

On 06/04/2013 06:43 PM, c. wrote:
> Kai,
>
> a short comment on your post:
> http://siko1056-gsoc.blogspot.it/2013/05/octave-forge-packet-incomplete.html#comment-form
>
> 1) There is no such thing as Octave 'packets'.
>     We do have Octave-Forge 'packages',

Hello c.,

thank you for your comment. I fixed my diction.

>     but it is not decided yet whether your code should be in a package
>     or in Octave-core itself.
>
> Have you tried building Octave sources yet?
> Have you started getting acquatinted with its development environment?

I must admit that for Octave-core development I need an advice for the 
workflow.

Up to now I update and build every week the octave sources via

hg pull
hg update
make (in my build directory)
make install

like described in 
http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/tip/etc/HACKING

But this takes about an hour on my machine. That was my intention to 
initially work in an Octave-forge package.

Now my question:
Let's say I made a code modification in "libinterp/corefcn/luinc.cc". 
How do I get in a reasonable time (< 5 minutes) a "working Octave" and 
compiler output that helps me to track errors in my code (that never 
happens to me, of course ;-) ). What was your typical workflow for this 
case?

> 2) There is an advantage in interfacing to ITSOL
>     rather than including the source code in Octave,
>     i.e. it will reduce the burden on Octave developers
>     for maintaining the code at a later time.
>    So I'd rather not dismiss
>
> c.

Yes I totally get your point and had a look about other libraries that 
are included during the octave build process rather than maintaining the 
sources by Octave itself. How do you handle the external library support 
for Windows installations for example? (Sry, I only tried Octave 
development with Ubuntu, so far). For Macs there you already created a 
solution, as I've seen.
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/GSoC-Incomplete-factorization-project-ITSOL-tp4653386p4653649.html

Kai