Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Thomas Treichl]

Hi Matthias,

I added a few comments between your lines below...

Matthias Brennwald schrieb:
> 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!

When I started to write the OctaveForMac page in January this year (resp. moved 
the old page to another link and updated this page) I didn't want to add full 
absolute site names because they normally change quickly and so it would be 
necessary to update them all the time. Users could then write emails like "Hey, 
you posted a broken link on the OctaveForMac page" and that is disturbing on the 
lists.

Tricks like typing (eg. in google)

  gfortran site:www.macresearch.org

should directly lead you to the desired sub-link. But if somebody else thinks 
that we should add full link names then please comment...

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

You see, I didn't read until here and you write about broken links. I will have 
a look and update them soon!

> - 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!)

You did very well! But another target when starting to update the OctaveForMac 
page was, to install so many "real" binary packages as possible (and Gnuplot for 
Aquaterm is one of them). Consider Linux, should we add a installation page for 
all the different distributions that are out there (and every distr. has another 
gnuplot, version, other packages dependencies etc.)

> - 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?

Ok, I try to describe this better - extension means "more features than the main 
features" and you need to reinstall Octave.

> 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

Ever heard about Platypus?
So long, Thomas