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

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Feb-2011, Richard Campbell wrote:

| 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.

I have no problem trying to make building from source simpler, but it
is unlikely that it will ever be trivial.  Most people will want to
install using some kind of binary package.

For GNU systems, that's usually pretty easy, because there are package
systems like RPM and dpkg, and we have had people preparing packages
for those systems, though it takes time, and we have never coordinated
releases so that the binary packages are available the same day that
the sources are officially released (does any other project do that?).

For other systems like OS X and Windows, where there is no
standard/official/whatever package system, things are more
complicated.  Even if we make Octave itself easy to build, we have no
control over how hard it might be to build all the dependencies
correctly.  I don't see that it is our job to fix the build systems of
every Octave dependency.

But if expect that the typical user of these systems will install
Octave from a binary package, then we don't have to waste a huge
amount of effort to try to make it possible for the typical user to
install Octave from source.  All we need to do is make it possible for
a typical developer to do that.

jwe