Re: Installation of Octave on Windows

[Agustin Barto]

Robert A. Macy wrote:
> It is my understanding that making such a binary is not a
> trivial act. 
>   
No really. Several "decades" ago I contributed a little to the Octave 
for Windows effort, and after collecting all the bits and pieces of 
information, Octave was could be compiled and packed without much 
effort. But as cygwin and Octave evolved, some bugs started to appear 
that started to make the task much more complicated. To complicate 
things I *really* needed octave-forge to be packed together with Octave 
(the package was supposed to ease the transition from Matlab to 
engineering students). The last time I tried to put all the things 
together, I failed time after time. I followed several threads on this 
list regarding a stand-alone Octave for Windows, and the answer was 
always the same: Why bother if you can install cygwin and then install 
the Octave package?

I got the message. It was obvious that supporting Windows wasn't an 
Octave (nor octave-forge) priority. Although I rarely use Windows, I 
couldn't (and I shouldn't) force the students to use Linux. Given that, 
we decided to bite the bullet and switch to SciLab. Although this 
required to translate a lot of code and documentation, we never again 
had to worry about the users' particular platform. The smartest decision 
we made in years (second only to the idea to switch to Free Software).
> Octave is a tool for my work and it took a lot of time to
> discover all the quirks and "work arounds" of what I now
> have, so unless upgrading is as smooth as the 2.1.50a
> binary, I can't really afford to interrupt my work for the
> sake of having the most "up to date" tool, just because
> it's the most up to date tool.  There has to be real value
> added for me to want to abandon what is working so well.  I
> do know that octave now has multiple indexed arrays, which
> could prove very useful.  But quite frankly, I haven't
> mastered the two index form yet.  Still have too many
> for-loops.  
>   
Same here. Octave is a tool, that depends on other tools like Windows. 
If they don't work well together, there's really no tool at all. You 
either switch to other OS, or switch to other tool like Octave. There's 
no free lunch here. Everything requires work and an adaptation period.
> And finally, I run octave on Windows 98SE and that god
> awful Windows XP.  I really appreciate the way 2.1.50a is
> simple, easy to install, remove, reinstall.  It doesn't
> take a lot of resources and doesn't insinuate itself
> throughout my OS.  Octave is just there, and works.  
>
>   
Let's hope it still works with Windows Vista.
> But soon as our firm migrates to Linux based, and
> everything changes anyway, I'll probably go for the updated
> version. 
>   
Probably you should start early by migrating to Linux yourself and 
getting an idea on how much work is needed to translate your code.


Agustin



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