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

[Stefan van der Walt]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 10:27:22AM -0500, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> 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.

Kudos to Quentin for his work on the Fedora release.  I personally use
Debian, but had to install Octave on a colleague's Fedora box the
other day.  The packages he made available (Dmitri's site?) at
ftp://coffee.phys.unm.edu/pub/octave proved invaluable.

Regards
Stefan



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