Re: Managing packages in the workbench
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg108792] Re: Managing packages in the workbench
- From: Albert Retey <awnl at gmx-topmail.de>
- Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 06:21:49 -0500 (EST)
- References: hoa1ao$fem$1@smc.vnet.net <hocm5u$sdh$1@smc.vnet.net> <hov7uo$8vs$1@smc.vnet.net>
Hi, > I've got the workbench to deploy the package files and the > documentation to a folder 2 directory levels below $UserBaseDirectory/ > Applications. The PacletInfo file gets deployed to $UserBaseDirectory/ > Applications/dir1/dir2/PacletInfo.m, the guides notebooks to > $UserBaseDirectory/Applications/dir1/dir2/Documentation/English/ > Guides/..., the application packages themselves to $UserBaseDirectory/ > Applications/dir1/dir2/.. > > But Mathematica does not find the documentation. Perhaps it can find > only PacletInfo.m files in $UserBaseDirectory/Applications/dir1 and > not in deeper directory levels? I think that this is the problem, you might be able to get things run with adopting certain pathes, but since everything that is beyond the standard case is undocumented it is hard work to find out what works and if so how. > When I open a documentation notebook manually, the links in it to > other documentation notebooks dont' work. Such a link looks, for > example, as "paclet:English/ref/someReferencePage". I was not > successfull to modify the links manually. > > The workbench documentation is rather unclear on the functionality of > the paclet system. Is it possible to describe in a single PacletInfo.m > file the documentation of several applications? Do you know where to > get more information? I am quite sure that all these things could in principle be possible in one way or another: after all the mathematica documentation itself has a deeper structure than what the workbench supports. But since nothing is documented and the "global" PacletInfo isn't a plain text .m-file but a binary database (PacletInfo.db) it is hardly possible to make use of these features and everything might change in a future version. So my conclusion is: you can either adopt your stuff to the structure that is supported by the workbench or don't use it at all. Struggling with all the details seems to be more work than rearranging the structure of existing packages... There is at least one more argument to not use a deeper directory structure for your packages at this time: In version 7 the documentation center lets the user uninstall a package with just a mouse click. AFAIK this will just delete the corresponding directory and if that contains more than one package/application, all of them will be deleted. hth, albert