Re: Release Ideas

[Marius Schamschula]

On Jan 28, 2015, at 3:00 PM, Ben Abbott <address@hidden> wrote:

>> 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

Well, the GUI icon can be put anywhere within the Applications folder (e.g. the 
MacPorts subfolder on my machines), as long as it correctly points to the 
octave hierarchy (which shouldn’t be /opt/local, /usr/local or /sw for obvious 
reasons). For CISM_DX we used /usr/local/CISM_DX and had the whole tree of 
OpenDX and octave with all their supporting libraries under that. I’ve never 
messed with building relocatable bundles - that’s really the hard part when you 
don’t build using Xcode.

Marius
--
Marius Schamschula