Re: GNU Octave 3.4.0 Released (Mac OSX?) (Jordi Guti?rrez Hermoso)

[Richard Campbell]

On Feb 12, 2011, at 1:41 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 12-Feb-2011, Richard Campbell wrote:
> 
> | Try building Octave on a vanilla install of OSX...
> 
> I can't, I don't have an OS X system.
> 
> | I'm working hard on documenting exactly what I've done to this
> | machine to get Octave working, and it's still not anywhere near
> | perfect (I get lots of warnings during regular use of Octave for
> | plotting, etc).
> 
> I'm happy to do what I can to help make things better, but I can't do
> the debugging for problems I can't duplicate on systems I don't have.
> We need more people who can regularly build Octave on OS X (and
> Windows) systems and who are capable of fixing the problems they 
> encounter.
> 
> I'm also willing to do the work to improve things on these systems
> myself, but since working on OS X and Windows is not something that I
> find enjoyable, I would want to be compensated for the effort.  I
> would not do that work as a volunteer.
> 
> jwe

And you shouldn't have to. I, and others, are the volunteers who use those 
platforms and should be able to do it.

I'm just trying to keep it in mind that a lot of people who want to use Octave 
are 75-year-old mathematicians who might not have ever compiled a FOSS project 
before. When potential users finally come to this board, begging for help, we 
shouldn't sneer at them. They're frustrated by the fact that getting set up to 
use this software is so far outside their comfort zone.

Campbell