Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Thomas Treichl]

A lot of question, a lot of answers, thanks everybody.

> > 1) All binary releases of GPL code must have available all of the source
> > code needed to rebuild them. So you'll need a source code bundle ideally
> >  available from the same location as the binary itself. I'm not sure
> > what sourceforge policy is on distributed such bundles particularly for
> > programs like Octave with lots of external dependencies, its likely to
> > be rather large (if rarely downloaded)....
>
> You just need to include the build scripts in admin/osx.

Ok, we can do this when it's the time for it, meanwhile I document everything 
what has to be done and also try to build some automatism...

> I personally would prefer two 120 Mb binaries rather than one 200 Mb binary.

Yes, so I concentrate on creating not a universal binary - it also makes more 
sense to me, if somebody with PPC can download the PPCapp and the one with IA 
architecture can download the IAapp.

> BTW, don't forget to include gfortran so that folks can install their own 
> packages.

Add the moment I think about that, what actually has to be included and what has 
not to be included, eg. I thought not to include the gnuplot binary, because 
there is a beautiful gnuplot.app on AquaTerm out there. I would more prefer to 
check for the gnuplot binary if it is there before octave will be started and 
then open some nice dialog if it isn't there and tell the user that he should 
get this?! We can also put the gnuplot.app into the octave.app.dmg with a nice 
Readme.html file?

In short: I think the octave.app may depend on other *.app that are out there in 
the wide world and that are hosted and maintained by another group of 
developers?! If we check if these apps are there, before we do the octave 
startup and tell the user, he can do the don

> How many Mb do all of these additional packages require?

This strongly depends on the dependencies ;o) I cleaned up resp. UnGNUified my 
Mac this morning so the first thing I deleted was the octave.app. But it was 
really big (because I simply added the whole TeX environment which has 600MB for 
its own) - and think it had >1GB. Okay, I do know what sizes you might expect 
(<100MB) so I try to do my very best.

At the moment I have the problem that the original libblas (accessed via the 
-framework vecLib option) that is shipped on my Mac inherits just the IA-dyld 
(but not the ppc-dyld). So the compiler tells me that cross-compilation is not 
possible there. So I would either need to solve the libblas dependency (what 
needs again more disk-space) or somebody else later creates the PPCapp on a real 
PPC?! At the moment I do this cross compilation because I think there are more 
Mac octave users out there that use PPC, also I like to know if the Mac Rosetta 
does a good translation from PPC to IA at runtime.

So long,
Thomas