Re: why is the wiki page on building octave so lacking?

[Richard Crozier]

On 18/03/2012 03:57, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 16 March 2012 11:33, Richard Crozier <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On the page main 'Appendix G Installing Octave' I would consider adding
>> a little introduction outlining the steps used to build Octave before
>> launching straight into the links to specific sections.
> 
> This sounds good. Please write it. I'll add it to the manual.
> 

ok, how about:

"Building Octave is easiest on Unix-like systems, e.g. Debian, Ubuntu,
etc. The procedure for building and installing Octave from its sources
on a Unix-like system is described in the sections below. To build on
other systems requires considerably more expertise, but is possible.
Further information on this is available online, such as on the Octave
wiki (http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=GNU_Octave_Wiki), but
note that this information is not directly controlled by the Octave authors.

Octave is a large and complex program which depends on many other
packages and libraries. The first section below describes how to obtain
and install these dependencies before attempting to build Octave itself.

This second section describes the process of building Octave itself. On
a Unix-like system building Octave can often be as simple as running a
few commands from the terminal. The Octave build system is based on GNU
make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/). This is a commonly used system
for compiling large and complex programs. It is often supplied as a
standard package, so you are likely to already have it installed. Before
running make to build Octave you must also first configure the build
process on your system by running a shell script supplied with the
source code. This configuration stage is also described in the second
section.

Note that this description applies only to Octave releases. If you wish
to build the development source, you must obtain them from the Mercurial
archive. Building the development sources requires additional steps as
described in <Building the Development Sources>. Further information on
building Octave can be found in the readme files supplied with the
source code."


Feel free to edit, or reject as desired!

> 
>> Another thing I would suggest is restricting the width of a page of
>> text.
> 
> Don't maximise your browser window. Or read the PDF version instead:
> 
>     http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/octave.pdf
> 
> Or we can modify the CSS so that the HTML manual's lines aren't so
> long. I have done just that. Please look at the HTML manual again and
> tell me if that's better.
> 

That looks much better I think. In future I will look at producing
changesets.


Richard

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