Re: Relocatable octave

[Paul Kienzle]

On May 31, 2007, at 2:02 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> Yes, if setting OCTAVE_HOME before starting Octave is not sufficient 
> to allow it to be installed in any directory and still work, then 
> please report the details of the bug.  If you move the entire Octave 
> installation and preserve the relative directory structure, then I 
> don't think you should have to set individual variables like 
> EXEC_PATH.

Okay, that helps a lot. It means we won't have to shimmer names for 
things such as the script file paths.

This will of course not work for redirecting the shared libraries.  
Processing of OCTAVE_HOME happens in liboctinterp.{dll,dyld,so}, so it 
obviously can't happen if {PATH,{DY,}LD_LIBRARY_PATH} is not set 
properly beforehand.  You could make the octave 'command' a shell 
script which adjusts the appropriate variables based on OCTAVE_HOME 
prior to running octave main, but is that worth the trouble?

It will be interesting to see how many problems are caused by spaces in 
OCTAVE_HOME.  There will be at least one: mkoctfile.m will fail with a 
space in bindir because it doesn't quote the command or the arguments 
before calling system().  Michael, can you test whether you can still 
do package builds if bindir is not part of the mkoctfile command on 
your windows build, and submit a patch if that is the case?

        - Paul