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

[PhilipNienhuis]

forkandwait wrote:
> 
> PhilipNienhuis <pr.nienhuis <at> hccnet.nl> writes:
> 
>> But to avoid disappointment for the "wider audience", or as you name it:
>> "typical Windows user" (and potential backfiring to Octave's reputation)
>> I
>> think more test reports are needed.
>> Perhaps a chicken-and-egg problem: maybe we first need an "alpha" /
>> "beta"
>> binary or RC to collect more user reports?
> 
> I have been using Tatsuro's latest binary 3.4.2 for a few weeks, and it
> has been
> fine except for an issue with FLTK fonts (which I have been remiss in
> getting
> onto a bug report).  I used the 3.2.4 for a year before that, with the
> only
> problem being that I had to run "replot" sometimes to get gnuplot to draw
> after
> being hidden by a window.
> 

dbnext / dbstep didn't work in 3.2.4; gnuplot is very slow - at work it's
hard persuading colleagues to try Octave if Matlab produces filled contour
plots of a 500x500 matrix in mere seconds while Octave takes tens of minutes
(if it finishes at all w/o errors).
But yes I was/am very happy with the 3.2.4 binary.



> I avoid Java like the plague, and I use csv files instead of trying to
> read/write to Excel, so I can't comment on those possible issues.
> 

For the OSS purists there's OpenJDK and OpenOffice.org. We discussed this
before, didn't we.

I'm no Java fan either, but in my case it was very convenient for
spreadsheet I/O development.
Java has been used with Octave for a lot more than that. I dare to say that
it can be very useful :-) especially as there are OSS .jar files for about
anything so one doesn't always have to reinvent the wheel.




> Perhaps silence can be taken as a recommendation?  I don't know what else
> one
> can do, really -- calling it beta or RC probably wouldn't really matter to
> anyone (and it is far beyond alpha, IMHO).
> 

Yes I agree (as to "beyond alpha").

Apart from fltk fonts (due to lacking "Swiss" or "Helvetica" fonts (I
forgot) on many Windows systems, maybe easily fixable in Octave) there are
issues with string escaping (double \\ needed where 3.2.4 needed just one \,
quite annoying) and fltk just hanging or crashing on some of our scripts.
Plus a few more. 
I reported some on the list, I need to enter others somewhere. But I
wondered: are these issues general MinGW or only pertaining to Tatsuro's
build? I wasn't sure where to report.

P.

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