error in pkg -forge install with macport Octaves

[Homer White]

Hello,

I see great things in Octave and am encouraging students in my differential equations class to become familiar with it as an alternative to MATLAB.  To that end I have been looking into Octave installation on all of the major platforms.  Typically I use Octave on Linux and on Windows with no problems.

For Mac OSX I chose to get Octave from Macports.  The installation, albeit lengthy, goes smoothly enough, but for every variant of Octave I have tried (octave and octave-devel-release) I am unable to install packages from Octave Forge.  For example:

>> pkg install -forge dataframe
error: urlwrite: unable to open file
error: called from
    pkg at line 395 column 23

i can confirm that the urlwrite function itself  works.  For example:

>> urlwrite("https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19778.txt.utf-8","alice.txt")

saves a copy of Alice in Wonderland to my working directory.

Does anyone know why urlwrite is failing when called by pkg?

Thanks,

Homer