Re: Standalone windows install: why?

[Brian Blais]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 31-Mar-2005, Brian Blais <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> | I would *love* to have a standalone windows install more recent than the 
> |   2.1.50, without having to do a cygwin install (and I'll check out the 
> | one posted), and I don't even run windows.
>
> Do you mean that you want a simple way to install Octave on Windows,
> or that you want an Octave binary that does not depend on Cygwin at
> all?

for me (and this may not have been the original poster's intent), I just 
want an easy way to install a recent version of octave in windows.

> OK, I'll concede this, but surely students can go to a web page and
> download software to install?  Accept defaults and click the "next"
> button until they finally click a "finish" button, then wait a few
> minutes while things are downloaded and installed?

I've tried this.  The cygwin install doesn't look like a standard
"InstallShield"-type installation.  The download time is long, but the
menus are *really* long.  Now, I don't have a personal problem with
this, but many of my students who have never installed anything more
complex than, say, Office do have a problem with it.  It is 
scary-looking, which may be enough to stop them, and if there is a
problem (say, the network gets flukey), then they have no way to debug
the issue.

Here's an idea that might work, but it would take someone with more
knowledge of cygwin than I.  I remember seeing once someone putting a
big tarball of the cygwin directory, and then an extra file which added
the necessary registry elements.  All you had to do was to extract the
tarball in the root c: directory, and then run this extra file, and
*poof* a full cygwin install was there.  Is this still possible?  Would
it be possible to do it with octave compiled?

If I were to add to this pie-in-the-sky wish list, I would like the
version of octave to have -enable-dl and -enable-shared options on, even
if gcc was not bundled with it, just so that it *could* run .oct files
compiled on another machine.


> So rather than eliminate Cygwin, it seems to me that it would be best
> to package Octave for Cygwin, then write an installer that simplifies
> the task of installing the Octave package for Cygwin.

I agree completely!


                                Brian Blais

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            address@hidden
            http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais



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