Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Matthias Brennwald]

Dear all

Just a few comments on the instructions on how to build and install  
Octave on a Mac (http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?OctaveForMac):

- I had a hard time finding gfortran on the macresearch.org site. In  
fact, I can't find it again right now. A better description on where  
to find it would help a lot!

- The urls to the gnu software don't work. Are they valid? I just  
connected to ftp.gnu.org and went on from there.

- gnuplot 4.2: to support X11 (which I prefer to aquaterm), the  
developer SDK for X11 from XCode needs to be installed before  
building gnuplot. For output to PDF files, I installed PDFLib-lite  
before building gnuplot. (thanks to Marius Schamschula for helping me  
with gnuplot!)

- the 'Extensions': is it possible to install these after installing  
octave? Or is it necessary to re-install octave to make use of the  
extensions?

In general: I think the number of Mac users would explode if Octave  
was available as a package that would be installed using the normal  
Mac Installer. This IS possible! I once downloaded the binary (Octave  
2.9.9) from the HPC site, put that into a Mac package using Apples  
PackageMaker program (that was a quick and dirty hack, though,  
following the hints here: http://s.sudre.free.fr/Stuff/ 
PackageMaker_Howto.html ). Then I successfully installed this package  
via the Mac Installer program -- no shell hacking! just one or two  
mouse clicks, et voila!! However, I don't know how to make a binary  
archive like the one on the HPC site that already knows where to  
install the files. I also don't know what (if) Mac specific  
information should be added to the Mac package, and how/where to  
include the license stuff.

Cheers,
Matthias


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Matthias Brennwald
Lägernstrasse 6
CH 8037 Zürich
+41 (0)44 364 17 03
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