[Pkg-octave-devel] Dynare status

Thomas Weber thomas.weber.mail at gmail.com
Mon Apr 20 19:52:17 UTC 2009


On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 06:29:42PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have been sidetracked by urgent issues during the last weeks, but I  
> now want to get ready for the first release of Dynare Debian package.
>
> Right now, the source package builds 3 packages:
> * dynare-common: all M-files, placed under /usr/share/dynare
> * dynare: arch-dependent files (an executable and some MEX files), in  
> /usr/lib/dynare
> * dynare-doc: manual, user guide and other doc stuff
>
> The only issue which still needs to be solved is how to make Dynare  
> available to Octave in its path.
>
> So far we have instructed Dynare users to manually add the relevant path 
> (here /usr/share/dynare/matlab) with "addpath" command, and then to run 
> the top-level file "dynare.m".

There are several options: we could add /usr/share/dynare/matlab to
Octave's path in /etc/octave3.0.conf.
I don't know what happens if the path doesn't exist, though.

We could change our way of adding paths similar to what Apache is doing
in Debian: create a directory under /etc, where every Octave related
package can drop a small file with just the necessary stuff for
initialization and /etc/octave3.0.conf just sources these files.

> So if we keep this way of using Dynare, the package can be released now 
> (provided that I update README.Debian). For the sake of simplicity, and 
> since this would be consistent with our Dynare package for Windows, I 
> would actually prefer that solution.
>
> Otherwise we could make a symlink in $(MDIR), pointing to dynare.m. This 
> is the easiest way of avoiding manual path manipulations. And I prefer a 
> symlink, because I don't wan't to move dynare.m out of  
> /usr/share/dynare/matlab (Matlab users need it).

I don't like the first option. The problem of making dynare.m available to
end-users is certainly within our possibilites as packagers, so we
shouldn't force users to use addpath. 

I understand your motivation as upstream developer to keep installation
instructions consistent, but I don't want to settle for the least common
denominator as distribution packager.

I'm surprised about the symlink option: is a sysmlink to dynare.m really
sufficient? No other paths needed?

	Thomas



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