Re: [Gretl-devel] more function package news
Sven Schreiber schrieb:
(that's a nicely euphonious phrase ;-)
First round of test:
Everything worked as expected during (the first) packaging.
Running the function package produced the error "needs gretl 1.8.4" (I'm
running today's cvs); so I wanted to edit the package and tried lowering
the requirement to 1.8.3 (via the clickable number field" in the GUI).
But when I try to save the changed version, again I get the error
"function needs gretl 1.8.4". This looks like a bug to me.
In CVS I've now shifted the default minimum version to 1.8.3; I'll
put it back to 1.8.4 at release time.
As for this bug, and the further ones you reported: sorry, I
should have done some testing myself before I asked anyone else to
do so, but thanks for blazing the trail!
Although the buggy effects were various they almost all stemmed
from a single, simple source, now fixed in CVS and snapshot. A
new piece of code that just wasn't ready for prime time.
So I start a new package to incorporate the lowered requirement.
But -- gretl complains "no functions available for packaging".
Ok, I did delete the previous package (that had just failed)
from my machine via gretl's package management GUI, but the
functions that I had run earlier in order to make them available
for packaging should still be available, no?
This one is a separate (and long-standing) issue, namely what
exactly should happen when you delete a function package via the
GUI? At present all that happens is that the function _file_ is
deleted, but it makes sense that the package should also be
unloaded from memory. Then what should happen to the functions
that the package comprised? Either they are unloaded too, or
(and this is the behavior you seem to regard as most intuitive)
they are retained in memory but disconnected from the
scrapped package (so they're available for packaging again).
That should be asy to arrange.
I wonder whether it may be too ambitious to have this GUI thing
for packaging (as opposed to have a GUI for running the package,
that's a great feature). Package authors are probably
scripting-savvy enough so that they could be expected to prepare
one special script with a special package mark-up (like
<helper-function-start> ... <helper-function-end> or whatever,
you get the picture), and when this marked-up script is run a
package is produced. Would that help in eradicating the bugs?
Possibly, though I'd like to persevere a little longer. I'm not
sure I have all the bugs out of the GUI editor yet, but with
current CVS things should look a lot better!
Allin.