Re: Is the 3.8 "release ? official? - mingw installer

[John D]

Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 07:20:02 -0800 (PST)
From: PhilipNienhuis <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Is the 3.8 "release ? official?
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

John W. Eaton wrote
> :
> <snip>
> :
> I don't think we have completely functional installers (including a 
> selection of packages) for Windows or OS X yet.  If we are going to 
> distribute "official" binaries, then who will be making them and from 
> where will we distribute them?

I could make an MXE-cross built Windows installer this week (after New Years
Eve I'll have time).
Do we first have installer-release candidates somewhere?

As to a formal installer release, would the Octave-Forge site still be good
enough? or do we need a site with a gentle or an obtrusive stimulus for
donating-before-downloading?

Anyway I think that before building it should be discussed here in this ML
what should be included.

In "my own" installers (that I've regularly built, used and tested at work
and at home in the last months) I have included ~12 OF packages (newest
versions) + all Java class libs for spreadsheet I/O (needed for the OF io
package), plus a few MinGW utils not yet included in MXE (or maybe they are
by now, I'll have to check). Altogether a 200+ MB installer.
I'll have to dive into the licenses of those Java .jar files to see how safe
we are. Note that Nitzan has been including all of them in the current 3.6.x
MinGW OF pkg installer archives on Octave-Forge.
Also I've (manually/hard-coded) patched the installer-generated shortcuts
for the Windows Start menu. 
The NSIS installer is still quite basic; e.g., no desktop icon yet. Should
we start the GUI from the desktop icon? I'd surmise Windows users simply
wouldn't expect otherwise.
Furthermore I have no idea how robust the installer is (in terms of catching
e.g., write permission errors etc).

In addition I'm still busy upgrading the OF io package - expected to be
ready within a few days (polishing stage right now). Would be nice to
include io-2.0.0 in the installer.

Philip


----------------

I updated the installer a few weeks ago with the changes from Anirudha that
related to mingw as well as a few of my own. It doesn't create a desktop
icon at the moment, but is easy to add. It does create the start menu icons,
documentation shortcuts etc. Currently the 'main' octave shortcut runs the
cli version of octave, with an additional shortcut called Experimental GUI.
I don't know if anyone else has gotten a chance to try it out.

Anirudha had a few additional octave packages that I hadn't added yet - I
will do that.

In addition I have a patch for the GUI shortcut to make it work with the new
install path of libexec.

What other mingw utils need to be installed?