Octave help on .mex files

Hi Mario,

Asking for a quick advice: during installation you make sure that
Octave3LinuxFiles are first in the path, so that .mex file is the one
picked up by Octave for the functionality, while .m sitting upstairs is
used solely for the documentation.

Since it makes it seems to be somewhat cumbersome to enable PTB
system-wide without touching the configuration of octave itself, (and
besides asking each user to .octaverc enforcing such order) I thought to
use:

http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Getting-Started-with-Mex_002dFiles.html
"To document mex-files, there should exist an m-file in the same
directory as the mex-file itself."

unfortunately it seems to don't work with stock octave 3.2.4 (you have
to request help for name.m, i.e. help Screen.m), but seems to be
fixed in upcoming 3.3 (tried using manually built octave).

So what would you recommend:

1. Keep your installation scheme (.mex files in a separate directory)
and advise users to add

addpath('/usr/share/psychtoolbox-3/PsychBasic/Octave3LinuxFiles')

to their ~/.octaverc (message could be spit out in AssertMex as well as
being present in README.Debian)

2. Deploy .mex alongside with .m, and for octave < 3.3 advise users to
use "help Screen.m" while searching for the help of the MEX extensions?

Thanks in advance for reply

On Sun, 19 Dec 2010, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

> Hi Mario,

> Thanks for taking care about freenect compatibility issue... I have
> prepared my patch, and only then fetched from SVN to find out that I should
> have done that first ;)

> on a related note:

> how much of compiler warnings do you usually observe/tollerate? ;) Some
> of them seems to be safe, while I see others (while building against system
> dynamic libraries) which might be a sign of possible future problems, e.g.

> Common/PsychKinect/PsychKinect.c:1275: warning: cast from pointer to integer of different size
> ...
> gl_auto.c: In function ‘gl_mapbuffer’:
> gl_auto.c:4031: warning: cast from pointer to integer of different size

> ?

> > long story short -- with Arne we just have just uploaded libfreenect to
> > Debian NEW version from 2010-12-11 so you should have needed
> > functionality. Could you verify either API is still compatible?

> > > the possibilities. It's not even announced yet. We will just track
> > > whatever the ppa does.
> > as soon as we get preliminary version of PTB package, and you confirm
> > that 2010-12-11 version of libfreenect is ok, we will provide packages
> > for libfreenect for all recent releases of Debian and Ubuntu from
> > neuro.debian.net.
--
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik