Re: Packaging Octave for Windows and OS X (was: writing integer with fwrite)

[Paul Kienzle]

On Dec 14, 2004, at 3:19 PM, Joe Koski wrote:

> on 12/14/04 11:56 AM, John W. Eaton at address@hidden wrote:
>
> > On 14-Dec-2004, Joe Koski <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > | The common Linux/OS X make file approach for the "you probably want 
> > this
> > | one" versions of octave and octave-forge on sourceforge would be my 
> > vote for
> > | a "Mac friendly" installer of octave.
> >
> > It seems to me that it would be more effective to improve Fink and
> > wrap apt-get (or whatever the Fink package system uses) in a "Mac
> > friendly" way rather than re-inventing an installer for every package.
>
> The standard way of installing software on the Mac is with the .dmg 
> file
> which is very user friendly and seen by almost all Mac users at one 
> time or
> another. Thanks to Per Persson, there are now .dmg files for both
> gnuplot-4.0 and AquaTerm. That would be the ideal solution for octave 
> and
> octave-forge too, but would require a personal commitment from someone 
> more
> familiar with the Mac OS than myself. I understand that this is
> fundamentally a resources problem for a limited number of Mac octave 
> users.

A mac installer is relatively easy to write.  All it needs is a bit
of applescript to open up a terminal and start octave with the 
appropriate
value of DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, an icon to drop onto the dock or into the
App directory and a bit of magic to create the .dmg directly from the
script.  I'm happy to assist any volunteers through this process 
assuming
they are willing to do a bit of leg work for things such as compiling 
octave,
octave-forge and the supporting libraries, creating the icons, and so 
on.

Yes it is less efficient to ship each binary with all the supporting
libraries than to use Debian's approach of having the package manager
control everything, but it requires a lot less coordination, makes it
easier to install, remove and support multiple versions and is a better
match to the expectations of the Mac user base.

- Paul



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