Re: Standalone windows install: why?

[John W. Eaton]

On 31-Mar-2005, Brian Blais <address@hidden> wrote:

| Here's an idea that might work, but it would take someone with more
| knowledge of cygwin than I.  I remember seeing once someone putting a
| big tarball of the cygwin directory, and then an extra file which added
| the necessary registry elements.  All you had to do was to extract the
| tarball in the root c: directory, and then run this extra file, and
| *poof* a full cygwin install was there.  Is this still possible?  Would
| it be possible to do it with octave compiled?

It might be possible, but I think it would be just about as simple to
provide a customized version of the Cygwin setup.exe that skips the
irrelevant parts and provides the defaults we need and to create a
setup.ini file that only includes the packages required by Octave.
Perhaps the modified setup.exe should refuse to perform the
installation if Cygwin already appears to be installed (in that case,
you should just run the Cygwin installer to update)?  Or it could
offer to update from the network and proceed in the usual way?

I think this will all work reasonably well if the Octave packages are
distributed from cygwin.com.  Then updating will work as expected
without requiring users to enter a special mirror site for Octave
packages.

My estimate is that an installation will require about 350-400MB, but
that is for a fairly complete Cygwin installation that includes full
TeX and X11 installations.  We could probably make it smaller by
default.  In any case, the packages will certainly fit on a single CD.

It would be very helpful if someone (or some group) would volunteer to
package Octave for Cygwin.  As I mentioned recently, I can help get
some of these things started, but I can't be the one to build and
upload packages on a regular basis because I simply do not have the
time to do it.

| If I were to add to this pie-in-the-sky wish list, I would like the
| version of octave to have -enable-dl and -enable-shared options on, even
| if gcc was not bundled with it, just so that it *could* run .oct files
| compiled on another machine.

With 2.9.x, the default configure options are now --disable-static and
--enable-shared (implies --enable-dl).

jwe



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