Re: octave on Mac

[Joshua Friedman]

Thanks for all your replies. I'll give it a try on my mac. At the school where I teach we just made the switch and we will be using Octave for every math course (roughly 1000 students). They are all on windows machines that my IT people administer so this mac issue should only come up for a few professors at my school.

Josh Friedman

Professor of Mathematics

US Merchant Marine Academy

Kings Point, NY

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:

On Mon, 2016-05-23 at 22:23 -0400, Joshua Friedman wrote:
> Mac is basically freeBSD so I am surprised that the Windows version
> works nicely but Mac seems to be a real problem.

Mac OS X has some packages from FreeBSD, but not all, and its
structure is radically different, not to mention that its package
managers are also very different (for example, Ruby files instead of
Makefiles for homebrew vs ports).

For Windows, the problem was basically solved by cross-compiling into
Windows. This is possible thanks to mingw. If it were possible to
cross-compile into Mac OS X, it would be a lot easier to build Octave
there too.

The problem for Mac OS X is very difficult. Many people have worked on
it, and we still do not have a completely satisfactory solution. You
should attempt it yourself to see why FreeBSD is not at all like Mac
OS X.

- Jordi G. H.

--

Joshua Friedman PhD
address@hidden
http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~joshua