Re: 3.6.0 release

[Lukas Reichlin]

On 25.11.2011, at 14:07, Jarno Rajahalme wrote:

> 
> On Nov 25, 2011, at 13:49 , ext Joaquim Luis wrote:
>> 
>> Than the honest thing to do is to assume that and put clearly on the Octave
>> page that Windows is not supported.
>> 
> 
> That would mean the Octave does not even compile on Windows. That would be 
> going too far. Maybe the Octave page should just state that binary packages 
> (on all platforms) are to be found elsewhere (links provided, but no promise 
> that newest release is to be found there).
> 
> Having said that, I think that having binary packages for OSX and Windows is 
> very important for Octave. I came on board with 3.2 on Windows and used the 
> it to do my matlab assignments on my Ph.D. studies, while everyone else was 
> using matlab...
> 
>  Jarno

I agree on the second paragraph. Without Thomas Treichls Octave.app, I wouldn't 
have started to use octave and there wouldn't be a revised control package.

There should be an installer for Windows and an app for OSX. I mean a single, 
self-contained binary without the need to install Cygwin or the "App Stores" 
Macports and Fink with all their dependencies. The situation on Linux is 
different to the situation on non-free systems Windows and Mac. The standard 
way of obtaining software is the package manager, so users get the binaries 
from the Linux distributors. Some have recent packages (Fedora) while others 
have not (Debian -> Ubuntu).

Even if none of the octave developers wants to maintain binaries for Windows 
and Mac, attention should be spent that one can build octave on these systems 
without writing patches first.

Lukas