Re: binary packages

[Per Persson]

On Feb 15, 2004, at 07:14, Paul Kienzle wrote:

> Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3:
>         Similar to windows, there are presently packages for fink,
>         for darwinports and standalone in various states of
>         repair. My own preference is again for a standalone
>         binary which doesn't depend on much else so that getting
>         someone up and running is simply a matter of dropping
>         the binary package somewhere in the Applications directory
>         and dragging it to the dock.

While I agree that a completely self-contained Octave.app that could be 
drag'n drop installed anywhere the user choose would be the ultimate 
Mac experience, I also think that it would be too much work right now. 
FWIW, I think such a goal could be achieved in the future, and without 
any changes to octave itself.
(If you're interested I have a screenshot of something I hacked up some 
time ago (2001?) here http://homepage.mac.com/persquare/oxide1.jpg and 
http://homepage.mac.com/persquare/oxide2.jpg )

So, for now I think that the best option is to provide a standard 
installer that installs a octave, octave-forge, gnuplot and all other 
deps.
It is also simple to provide an octave "wrapper", a shell script that 
behaves like an application in that is has a custom icon, may be 
dragged to the doc, can be installed anywhere etc. (Just append 
.command to an executable script, and you'll see.)

Such an installer may also provide post-install options to set up 
paths, editor etc.
(I think a lot of people would like to use BBEdit which works really 
well)
I certainly wouldn't miss the opportunity to add AquaTerm to the mix;-)
(AquaTerm also supports both PGPLOT and PLplot)

I'd be able to help on packaging octave et al as long as we keep it a 
reasonably long term goal.

> Again a lot of work needs to be
>         done on sundries to make sure the OS X package can use
>         qhull, ginac, fftw, hdf5, etc.

Yes, I'm playing with hdf5 and fftw3 right now.

> I don't know if we need separate
>         binaries for 10.2 and 10.3.

Most likely not.
Another decision is the level of architecture support we'd want. Simple 
option is to generate code that runs on all ppc's.

Even if we had to differ between 10.2 and 10.3 and decide to support G4 
and G5 extensions, the libs and executables may be created "fat" which, 
if I understand correctly, means that they can host code for different 
targets. (Even ix86 if necessary...)

> I don't know if veclib is always
>         available and sufficient,

Available and sufficient as of 10.2

> or if we need to support a variety
>         of Atlas-enhanced libraries.

No.

> I don't know if there is a standard
>         place where the community can post such binaries, or if
>         octave-forge is the best place to host them.

There are several link sites, including Apples own third-party 
listings, that would host info and links to a binary at sourceforge.

/Per



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