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Re: Which version of Octave?


From: Paul Kienzle
Subject: Re: Which version of Octave?
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 22:15:36 -0500



On Mar 24, 2004, at 9:44 PM, Joe Koski wrote:

on 3/24/04 5:00 PM, Paul Kienzle at address@hidden wrote:


On Mar 24, 2004, at 2:21 PM, Joe Koski wrote:

Those are my two bits worth of input anyway. I would be willing to do a
draft of this approach for everyone's review, but I would need some
inputs
on the latest graphics options.

Here's a start:

http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?OctaveForMac

To quote Yogi Berra, Paul must be getting "deja vu all over again" on this subject. Yes the wiki pages look like a good starting point. What is missing on the wiki is the gnuplot/aquaterm part of the installation. Does Per or
anyone have some up-to-date recommendations regarding which versions of
gnuplot and Aquaterm to install on the Mac, or should we just refer folks to
Fink or DarwinPorts for the latest ports?

Let me rephrase:  rather than starting from scratch on the document
you are going to draft, please update the wiki for Mac OS X.

One of my concerns in looking these things over echoes some of Henry's
thoughts. Every path to Octave/octave-forge requires some ability by the
installer to use an editor, understand the function of a make file, and
navigate in the UNIX environment. This even applies to Fink and DarwinPorts installations. This is part of the open source "challenge" that many (most?) Mac users are trying to avoid. On the other hand, given the frequency of updates and the various OSF dependencies, I can't see an easy, cheap, and
flexible alternative.

I agree completely that the current state is much too difficult.  I also
know that it can be made better.  I spent a lot of time in the past
few weeks figuring out how to do things like build compressed
disk images from makefiles, associate icons with scripts, start
X11 programs from the dock (complete with drop-file support),
etc.  Much of this can apply to an octave package.

For example, I would avoid installing things in /usr/local.  Instead
put everything in a folder on a compressed disk image which the
user can drag where they want on their harddisk, and have a
startup icon which opens up a terminal with octave running inside
it and pointers to the appropriate gnuplot.  Surely there is some
LD_LOADPATH magic of some sort which will allow octave to
find its dylib files even though they are not in /usr/local/lib/octave-xxxx.

Maybe somebody has already written a generic command line
program app where you can drop your binary somewhere under
Contents/Resources, and put a little bit of magic in Info.plist so
that you can open a terminal and start an application.  It doesn't
sound hard to do.   You might be able to do it with pure applescript
on 10.3 --- 10.2 only creates classic apps, but unfortunately 10.3
applescript apps won't run on 10.2.  I'm not ready to give up on
10.2 just yet, though without a virtual screens, Exposé is pretty
compelling.

If building a new package is simply a matter of downloading
the new octave, updating octave-forge from cvs and typing
make dist, then it will not be too onerous to keep up with the
versions (especially if Debian has already worked out the
PPC issues for us ;-)

For now I'm working on an easier windows build system, so
I won't be acting on this for a while.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden



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