Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release

[Andy Adler]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Bill Denney wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Andy Adler wrote:
>
> > My version is 2.1.42 and is about 4 years old. I'll be changing my
> > web page to send people to a newer version soon (when the term ends
> > and I can get a breath)
>
> I'm not trying to rush you-- I just prefer for people to see the better
> features that we have put forward in the newer versions.
>
> > OTOH, one advantage of the package I made was that it was very small
> > (ie <4MB for a complete octave + tools). To get this small size I used
> > a static link of octave + octave-forge. This niche is still unfilled
> > in octave for windows installs.
>
> It's small, but it's also has significantly fewer features.  I would guess
> that most people would be more interested in having multi-dimensional
> arrays (as starts I think around 2.1.51) than ~18MB fewer to download.  I
> know that there are parts of the world where download speeds and costs
> make smaller better, though.

You're right. I may try to do a static build of a 2.9.x version.

> >> Should we just do a special test for /cygdrive/ in the path name of the
> >> editor and return a path with /cygwin (or better-- finding the actual
> >> directory to cygwin)?
> >
> > This is way too complicated and will actually disadvantage the user.
> > The user should be able to use any editor they like - cygwin or not.
> >
> > The correct way is to let the user choose the editor (via the EDITOR
> > variable) during the install process. Then we run it with any '\'
> > changed to '/'. This will work for *nix or windows.
> >
> > ie
> >   export EDITOR="C:/windows/system32/notepad.exe"
> >   octave
>
> This doesn't fix the problem I was thinking of.  The problem that I was
> discussing is if you do that it's fine, but if you type
>
> edit plot
>
> at the octave prompt with an editor that is outside of the cygwin
> environment (i.e. notepad from your example), it will try to edit an empty
> file because the path it will be passed is
>
> \usr\share\octave\2.1.73\plot\plot.m
>
> while notepad can't find a file there, it can find the file it's looking
> for at
>
> c:\cygwin\usr\share\octave\2.1.73\plot\plot.m
>
> (I didn't specifically check the path to plot, so the path may be wrong,
> but the statement is generally true).
>
> Essentially we would need to check if the editor is outside the cygwin
> environment then we may need to mangle the path to show correctly for
> being called from outside cygwin.

The cygwin utility to do this is cygpath.exe

so you can do
    system('cygpath -msa /usr/share/octave/2.1.73/plot/plot.m')
to get
    c:/cygwin/usr/share/octave/2.1.73/plot/plot.m

There are different switches for different slashes. If cygpath
doesn't exist, then we can assume that we're not on a cygwin
system.
--
Andy Adler <address@hidden> 1(613)562-5800x6218



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