Re: GSoC project about binary packaging

[Michael Goffioul]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Patrick Noffke <address@hidden> wrote:

How about making Octave GUI optional during the

> installation if we can selectively choose which components to install?

Hmm, once QtHandles is ported over, I'm not sure how easy this will
be.  I believe octave.exe will be built with a Qt event loop, and
there will be a separate octave-cli.exe for command-line only.  I
suppose if the GUI is deselected, you could install octave-cli.exe as
octave.exe (or maybe create a shortcut?).  Michael can better answer
this.

I'm not sure it's worth spending time on that. Would people really install octave without the GUI? That could make sense for installing on a server without a display, but in Windows....? I don't think so. A better option is to install the GUI, but create multiple startup links to start octave with and without the GUI. You can use the regular octave.exe to start octave in command-line mode. That version of octave could then be modified to still provide the required QApplication to make QtHandles work properly.

One of the main points of splitting into components is to save disk space; but if you still install QtHandles, this will pull in all Qt libraries anyway, and the size octave GUI itself will not be significant.

Anirudha, if you want to go down the WiX road, that's fine with me. One important thing, though, is to make sure that octave can still be installed by normal users without admin privileges (single-user install into a user-local directory).

Michael.