Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Paul Kienzle]

On Apr 8, 2007, at 7:44 AM, Marius Schamschula wrote:
> I also had a look at the Mac installation page a couple of days ago, 
> and noticed that there was no mention of MacPorts 
> <http://www.macports.org/>. They currently have octave 2.9.9 and 
> octave-forge 2006.07.09.
>
> Fundamentally it is possible to build octave as a .pkg or .mpkg for 
> Apple's Installer.app. I did this several years ago. I later pulled 
> this .mpkg due to the duplication of effort with my normal .tar.gz 
> based install system. The real problem is coming up with the file 
> list. You can't just package up everything in /usr/local, so you need 
> to build into a separate tree. This is a bit of a chore, since you 
> have to add a lot of configuration arguments and environmental  
> variables. My coworkers at Boston University use this approach for 
> CISM_DX - which currently includes octave 2.1.72 - see 
> <http://www.bu.edu/cism/cismdx/>. Alternately, you can use a utility 
> to find changed files, such as afick. However, it may miss files that 
> were not overwritten during the install process.

You could also build octave as an app.  The octave libraries can be 
moved so long as you set the appropriate variables before running such 
as DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the octave libraries and the 
appropriate m-file path on octave startup.  You can even include 
gnuplot and aquaterm in the bundle for an extra couple of megabytes so 
that the user doesn't have to work to find them.  You can similarly 
hack mkoctfile so that it runs from the octave prompt and can find the 
header files (with the new package manager this is probably available 
already), so that users can write their own extensions and download 
packages.

The only part I don't know how to do is start a terminal with octave 
running when you click on the app, and figuring out how to set the 
proper working directory.  If nothing else you could probably embed the 
Terminal app in the bundle as well, or alternatively use one of the 
octave IDEs that run on the Mac.

- Paul