Re: Release Ideas

[Ben Abbott]

> On Jan 28, 2015, at 3:54 PM, Marius Schamschula <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Jan 28, 2015, at 2:48 PM, Ben Abbott <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> Not necessarily. Years ago when we built the OS X version of CISM_DX, see 
> <http://cism.hao.ucar.edu/cismdx/install.htm>, we built octave using 
> MacPorts, but installed it into a custom path.
> 
> Marius

I've done that myself. I even modified it to install as a relocatable bundle 
... but it wasn't an easy task. If we don't make it relocatable, is there a way 
to enure there isn't a conflict?

Ben