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
I guess I haven't tried building on Yosemite (I always wait a while to install the latest and greatest from Apple). Homebrew has always "just worked" for me on Mountain Lion and Mavericks.
As to the amount of time it takes to install via homebrew, I uninstalled my entire Homebrew directory and deleted the download cache and reinstalled. It took about 24 minutes to install everything. I put the install log on pastebin at http://pastebin.com/guzfNNLS
When reading the install log, note that every download that is of the form package_name.bottle.tar.gz is a binary installation that doesn't have to be compiled. Very few of the Octave dependencies installed through Homebrew actually have to be compiled. I actually have a pretty slow broadband connection (3Mbps) so I suspect that a ton of those 24 minutes was just downloading the packages.
So, still not super simple, but simple enough that <insert arbitrary high percentage here> of people could do it (pre-Yosemite) with some handholding.
John S. |