Re: Default GUI or CLI for 3.8

[John W. Eaton]

From the messages I've seen so far, everyone seems to be in favor of
releasing with the 3.8 version number and the GUI disabled.  That's
OK, but I'm not sure it will accomplish what we want.

3.8 vs. 4.0 probably doesn't mean much to most users.  Many of them
don't even know what version of Octave they are using.  One number is
just as good as any other.

We can ask, but we can't prevent packagers from enabling the GUI by
default.  And users are likely to just want to run it regardless of
what we do.  Having a --gui option won't tell them anything except
that the GUI is optional.  It won't tell them that we consider it to
be in a state of testing.  If that's what we want users to understand,
then we need to be more explicit about that.  Subtle clues like
version 3.8 instead of 4.0 and having the GUI disabled by default
isn't enough.

How about adding a message box to the top menu bar that has a warning
icon and tells people that this is the first release of the GUI and
that we are looking for feedback and help with testing and fixing it?

I'm aware that there are problems, but I think the GUI is working
pretty well on Windows and GNU/Linux systems now.  I think we should
make it start by default on those systems (still with the warning
displayed) just because there are more serious problems on OS X.

jwe