Re: popularizing Octave (was "windows version of Octave")

[Quentin Spencer]

John W. Eaton wrote:

> ...
> No, this will not be perfect, but it will be a lot less effort than
> anything else I can think of, so we can have something useful soon.
> Then we can worry about making it better with packages for ATLAS,
> FFTW, HDF5, UMFPACK, etc., and making the installation even simpler.
> But at least people will have a current version of Octave to use while
> we are doing all of that.  All it really will require is for someone
> (or better, some group) to build the Cygwin package and upload it to
> the Cygwin site.  You'll also need to become enough of a member of the
> Cygwin community that they will accept the package.  This means
> joining and reading a mailing list, and being responsive to building
> new packages in a relatively timely fashion.  See
> http://cygwin.com/setup.html for more details about becoming a Cygwin
> package maintainer.
>
> To make things a bit easier, I have some scripts for building cygwin
> packages that you can use to get started.  Eventually, maintaining the
> package should be as simple as
>
>  * download a new version of Octave
>
>  * run a single script to build the new package (in most cases this
>    will simply work; occasionally there may be problems to fix)
>
>  * upload the package to the Cgywin site
>
> but even so, I can't be the one to do this regularly.  We need some
> volunteers.  So if you really want to see Octave on Windows improve,
> this would be a great place to start.
>  
It's important to note that because of the number of different platforms 
that octave is used on, John has not provided binaries of octave for 
several years (I think I recall he used to). Right now it's very easy to 
get Octave running on Debian Linux precisely because a group of 
volunteers has taken over the task of building packages for the 
community. I'm working on doing the same for Fedora Linux, and hopefully 
if the same thing happens for Cygwin, this will ensure that a large 
majority of octave users have an easy way of keeping up with octave 
releases.

I realize that while the cygwin setup procedure, while straightforward, 
requires more "clicks" than many Windows users are accustomed to. 
However, I agree with John that a regularly updated Cygwin package is 
better than the current state of confusion about octave for windows. 
Another thing to consider is that if you look at Debian, Fedora Extras, 
and Cygwin, I think some type program that updates an entire system when 
needed is the direction that the free software world is moving, because 
there are many more programs and dependencies than one person can easily 
keep track of.

-Quentin



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