[OctDev] Providing alternative functions

[Teemu I. <tpi...@pc...>]

Hi everyone,

I've made a set of functions which replace the standard gnuplot based 2d
plotting commands by similar functions using Grace
(http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/). They're available in
http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~tpikonen/octave/grplot-2003.08.08.tgz

I'd like to contribute these to octave-forge, but as the functions have
same names as their gnuplot counterparts in standard Octave, normal
octave-forge installation would cause these functions to override the
defaults. Of course, this is probably not what most people installing
octave-forge would want.

The octave-plplot package (available in Debian, at least) avoids this
problem by installing it's m-files to a location which is not in the default
LOADPATH (/usr/share/plplot_octave to be exact) and then modifying the
LOADPATH to include or not to include this path via a script
(toggle_plplot_use).

I've implemented (i.e. copied) a similar thing in my Grace package, but I'm
not sure where should I upload the files in octave-forge. Maybe a new
directory hierachy like main/alternatives is needed? Directories which are
found there could then be installed in something like
$prefix/share/octave-forge-alternatives 

Comments?

Teemu