Re: Windows binaries

[Andy Adler]

On Thu, 8 May 2003, John W. Eaton wrote:
> What is the current state of Octave binary distributions for Octave?

I believe that the most current version of octave/windows is
on octave.sf.net. It is 2.1.42 compiled/prepared by me.

Basically there are two distributions:

1. Windows *.exe installer. Includes everything necessary
   to make octave work. (cygwin/gnuplot/epstk/ATLAS).
   Will not break cygwin mount paths.
   (ATLAS and non-Atlas version provided)

2. Cygwin install. Includes octave/octave-forge/gnuplot
   (ATLAS and non-Atlas version provided)

The windows *.exe is the most popular download

This version is compiled statically only. This version
is also available on my web site. I have only had one
bug report in the last 2 months. (I fixed all the previous
reported bugs)

Paul Kienzle and I have discussed the right way to
package the next version. It should be dynamically linked,
but use a shared version of libstdc++. The trick is that
the *.a files cannot be stripped for people who want to
compile *oct files. Thus it makes sense to have an
octave and octave-devel package.

I plan to get around to working on this within the next
month.

> I would like to see all of these efforts merged in some way so that we
> can point to one place and have a simple set of instructions (i.e.,
> get this file, run it, click next, next, next, finish, possibly
> selecting some options along the way, and then you are done).

We more of less have this now.

> Should the Octave binary distribution include everything needed, or
> should there be a set of packages (octave, gnuplot, etc.)?

I think we should have cygwin specific versions (devel and use)
that are separate, but the windows *.exe should have everything.

Windows support is really important to getting broad octave acceptance.
I think that we're currently most of the way there.

Andy