Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Marius Schamschula]

On Apr 8, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Thomas Treichl wrote:

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.

It is an open secret that the .pkg mechanism has a number of limitations. Apple says as much themselves. Who knows, maybe Leopard will bring something better.

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.

The performance cost of universal binaries is not great, they just chew up more hard drive space. The statement about emulation is incorrect. This only happens if you run a PPC binary on an Intel box. A universal binary contains both PPC and Intel binaries, and executes the appropriate binary. The problem is to tweak the configuration scripts to build universal binaries. I prefer to build architecture specific versions, they just work. This issue has come up several times on the MacPorts (DarwinPorts) mailing list. The consensus was not to build universal binaries.

I just looked at the README file for octave 2.9.10 and found that it depends on over 30 other packages. Octave-forge adds even more...

Marius

--

Marius Schamschula

Webmaster

The Huntsville Macintosh Users Group

www.hmug.org

webmaster at hmug dot org

marius at schamschula dot com

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