Re: Where to distribute auxiliary data files?

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 08/18/2014 04:29 PM, Rik wrote:
> 8/18/14
>
> Matlab comes with a number of data files which they use repeatedly in their
> documentation.  Some of the data sources are freely available.  One of
> these is the 3-D data for a penny which comes from NIST.  This file has
> been made available to Octave, but where should it be placed?
>
> Possible choices:
> 1) examples/ directory.  Currently this holds only code samples for the
> External Code Interface (.oct, .mex files)

"examples" gets one's attention, but it is sort of too broad and 
encompassing.

Then again, I'm not sure how builders think of these .oct and .mex 
files.  Say someone has a patch which contains a set of .oct or .mex 
files.  Might they put them in the "examples" directory?


> 2) etc/ directory.  Currently this holds a grab bag of stuff such as NEWS,
> doc-cache, config.log, and a directory with the fixed built-in tests.

If we were to think of "etc" in the Unix/Linux sense, this might be 
where .oct and .mex files should go:

etc/oct
etc/mex

and further organization of the "etc" directory might be:

etc/readme
  HACKING
  README.Linux
  README.Cygwin
  README.MacOS
  README.gnuplot
  README.MinGW
  README.kpathsea
  README.Windows

etc/news
  NEWS.1
  NEWS.2
  NEWS.3

etc/CHECKLIST (i.e., remains as a file in etc)

etc/debug or etc/gdb
  gdbinit

etc/app or etc/xml
  octave.appdata.xml (what is this file used for?)


> 3) New location.  The imagelib directory is distributed in
> local/share/octave/VERSION/imagelib and contains default images and icons.
> Perhaps we need a new data/ directory that contains distributed data files.

There seems like a few logical places, one just as good as another. 
"imagelib" is good until something more logical comes about, even if the 
data set is 3D.

Dan