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

[Ben Abbott]

On Feb 12, 2011, at 1:19 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 12-Feb-2011, Richard Campbell wrote:
> 
> | On Feb 12, 2011, at 4:11 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> | 
> | > Re: GNU Octave 3.4.0 Released (Mac OSX?) (Jordi Guti?rrez Hermoso)
> | 
> | Joking aside, let's not lose sight of the fact that the ratio of people who 
> could potentially do amazing things with Octave, versus people who have the 
> necessary skillset and background to compile it from source, is probably very 
> large.
> 
> So it takes a lot of skill to type the five commands (after downloading)
> 
>  tar zxf octave-3.4.0.tar.gz
>  cd octave-3.4.0
>  ./configure
>  make
>  make install
> 
> ?
> 
> That is all it normally takes on my system.
> 
> jwe

MacOS isn't there yet. However, I think it is getting closer.

The biggest drawback is the lack of a universal package management solution. 
Fink and MacPorts have been more or less equivalent up to Snow Leopard (10.6). 
However, for the moment MacPorts appears to have a significant advantage (at 
least for Octave).

With the efforts of Jarno, Richard, and others, I'm hopeful that building on 
MacOS 10.6 will continue to improve. As the convenience of building improves 
I'm hopeful (maybe naively so) that there will be more individuals willing to 
produce a dmg-bundle for MacOS.

Ben