Binary distributions (was: Re: Release goals for 3.6)

[John W. Eaton]

On  2-Aug-2011, Lukas Reichlin wrote:

| Although I am an Octave-Forge developer and not an Octave one, I'd
| like to share a few thoughts on the future development of
| Octave. IMHO fully functional and up-to-date binaries for Windows
| and Macintosh are of utmost importance:

I think building binary packages is nice, but I don't know that it
should be the responsibility of the Octave project to build and
distribute them.

But if you want to take on this project, then I will do what I can to
help.  First, I think you will have to find people who are interested
in and capable of building binaries for Windows and OS X, and then
coordinate their efforts so that the binaries can be distributed.

Also, if you do build binaries and distribute them, what level of
support are you willing to provide for free?  For example, when bugs
are reported, will they be fixed?  I don't think the oct2mat problem
was ever fixed with the 3.2.x binary distribution for Windows that is
on Source Forge.  That kind of problem makes Octave look bad, and it
seems like it would be easy to fix simply by dropping a single package
from the binary installer.

| One may ask why it is important to attract new users: Some of them
| may become developers one day! Think of the trophic pyramid. The
| same is true for professional sports which is not possible without a
| broad field of amateurs which encourages young talent.

We've discussed this a lot in the past and I remain unconvinced.

As far as the type of developers we currently need for Octave in order
to distribute binaries, your argument seems to point to a circular
dependency.  We need more people who are capable of building binaries
on non-free systems, so to attract those potential developers, we have
to build binaries for the non-free systems?  Wouldn't that mean that
we will have already done the work that we are trying to find others
to do?  We have had binaries available for Windows for several years
now, along with fairly comprehensive directions and scripts (in Octave
Forge SVN) and so far we don't seem to have even one volunteer who
really appears to want to take on the job of building binaries for
Windows.

jwe