Re: Release Ideas

[Ben Abbott]

> On Jan 28, 2015, at 3:24 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 01/28/2015 02:50 PM, John Swensen wrote:
> 
>> I know it is a cop-out, but is it really too hard to ask people to go to a 
>> terminal and type:
> 
> Yeah, I suspect it is.
> 
>> ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL 
>> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
>> 
>> and then type:
>> brew tap homebrew/science
>> brew install gfortran
>> brew update && brew upgrade
>> brew install gcc
>> brew install octave
>> 
>> I know this is a bit harder, but for a "unsupported" platform it is still 
>> quite easy. The only issue is that for the homebrew recipe that the gui is 
>> not the default and you have to run "octave --force-gui"
> 
> How long does this process take for someone who is installing everything for 
> the first time?
> 
> Even if you scripted this and put a pretty GUI "one-click" installer around 
> it, I suspect most users would find it annoying that it takes possibly hours 
> to install while the system is quite busy.
> 
> Also, if it is this simple to build Octave from homebrew, why do we see so 
> many people complaining about how hard it is to build Octave for OS X?

I think the biggest hurdle for Mac OSX is that Yosemite's clang has broken a 
some things. Both Fink and Macports are now able to build 3.8.2 on Yosemite, 
but those solutions do not work for me using the default branch. My impression 
(and not a reliable one) is that I'll need clang 6 before a build can be 
successful..

> Finally, if it is this simple, then why hasn't anyone turned the resulting 
> binaries into a simple installer?  Is that part difficult?

That would be easy, but Octave would end up installed in the directory 
structure reserved for Homebew, Macports, or Fink.

Ben