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Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki


From: Thomas Treichl
Subject: Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki
Date: Sun, 08 Apr 2007 18:20:19 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Macintosh/20070221)

Hi everybody,

I also had a look at the Mac installation page a couple of days ago, and noticed that there was no mention of MacPorts <http://www.macports.org/>. They currently have octave 2.9.9 and octave-forge 2006.07.09.

Fundamentally it is possible to build octave as a .pkg or .mpkg for Apple's Installer.app. I did this several years ago. I later pulled this .mpkg due to the duplication of effort with my normal .tar.gz based install system. The real problem is coming up with the file list. You can't just package up everything in /usr/local, so you need to build into a separate tree. This is a bit of a chore, since you have to add a lot of configuration arguments and environmental variables. My coworkers at Boston University use this approach for CISM_DX - which currently includes octave 2.1.72 - see <http://www.bu.edu/cism/cismdx/>. Alternately, you can use a utility to find changed files, such as afick. However, it may miss files that were not overwritten during the install process.

You could also build octave as an app. The octave libraries can be moved so long as you set the appropriate variables before running such as DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the octave libraries and the appropriate m-file path on octave startup. You can even include gnuplot and aquaterm in the bundle for an extra couple of megabytes so that the user doesn't have to work to find them. You can similarly hack mkoctfile so that it runs from the octave prompt and can find the header files (with the new package manager this is probably available already), so that users can write their own extensions and download packages.

I can't remember where I read it, but I can remember clearly that *pkg is not liked very much anymore on the Mac. A few days ago I gave Platypus a chance (that is also used like you already noticed from Gimp and the other Gnu progs). We could use bash or *py to write the rest for the installation and maybe open up (question from Paul) a terminal with octave inside?! My problem at the moment is that Octave is such a powerful large program and I don't know where to start creating the Mac installer with Platypus.

Another thing is, don't think about creating a universal binary *app. I carefully read the Mac developer pages a few days ago and I think we then lose a lot of performance because some things in a universal binary *app is emulated from the Motorola side to the IA.

<snip>

So long
Thomas


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