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Re: Still need help installing Octave on a Mac


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: Still need help installing Octave on a Mac
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:23:34 -0400

On 28-Mar-2008, Lou U wrote:

| As a novice to Octave, I agree with the sense of wdflannery's
| remarks that the support and documentation for Windows users is less
| than desirable. Of course, if there more Windows users there might
| be better support, and vice versa. In any case, I will be willing to
| document my experience once I get up to speed, but at my current
| pace, that may take a while.

Thanks.  Your help and the help of others is definitely needed and
I'm sure will be appreciated by many people.

Looking at the download statistics for the Windows binary installer
for Octave 3.0.0, there have been approximately 46,000 downloads in
the 3 months that it has been available.  But out of all the people
using Octave on Windows systems, we have approximately three people
doing significant amounts of work specifically on the Windows port of
Octave, and that includes fixing Windows-specific bugs and doing
packaging for the Cygwin, MinGW, and MSVC versions.  We have a similar
situation for the OS X port.

So anything you (and others!) can do to help out would certainly be
welcome.  You don't have to be an expert to contribute.  For the
current problem of imporoving the installation experience, the
perspective of newcomers is precisely what is needed.  Those of us who
know how to install Octave or where to go for information are unlikely
to see the trouble spots.

As for the idea that things would be better if only there were more
users, I agree with that to some extent, though I think some fraction
of the users would have contribute in some way (as I encourage you to
do, and hope you will).

In order for a free software project like Octave to thrive in the long
term, there will need to be some investment in it.  That investment
may be monetary so that a small group can afford to focus on creating
the software that many use.  Or it may be the investment of time and
expertise of the members of sufficiently large and well-organized
community of skilled volunteers who create and maintain the software
that their community uses.

The Octave community currently has a growing group of experts, and
that is an encouraging trend.  But it is still an extremely small
group given the size of the project, so we could certainly use your
help.

jwe


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