-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Adler [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 4:53 AM
To: Bill Denney
Cc: Doug Stewart; address@hidden
Subject: Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release
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