Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Marius Schamschula]

On Apr 8, 2007, at 5:06 AM, Matthias Brennwald wrote:

Dear all

Just a few comments on the instructions on how to build and install  

Octave on a Mac (http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?OctaveForMac):

- I had a hard time finding gfortran on the macresearch.org site. In  

fact, I can't find it again right now. A better description on where  

to find it would help a lot!

- The urls to the gnu software don't work. Are they valid? I just  

connected to ftp.gnu.org and went on from there.

- gnuplot 4.2: to support X11 (which I prefer to aquaterm), the  

developer SDK for X11 from XCode needs to be installed before  

building gnuplot. For output to PDF files, I installed PDFLib-lite  

before building gnuplot. (thanks to Marius Schamschula for helping me  

with gnuplot!)

- the 'Extensions': is it possible to install these after installing  

octave? Or is it necessary to re-install octave to make use of the  

extensions?

In general: I think the number of Mac users would explode if Octave  

was available as a package that would be installed using the normal  

Mac Installer. This IS possible! I once downloaded the binary (Octave  

2.9.9) from the HPC site, put that into a Mac package using Apples  

PackageMaker program (that was a quick and dirty hack, though,  

following the hints here: http://s.sudre.free.fr/Stuff/ 

PackageMaker_Howto.html ). Then I successfully installed this package  

via the Mac Installer program -- no shell hacking! just one or two  

mouse clicks, et voila!! However, I don't know how to make a binary  

archive like the one on the HPC site that already knows where to  

install the files. I also don't know what (if) Mac specific  

information should be added to the Mac package, and how/where to  

include the license stuff.

Cheers,

Matthias

I also had a look at the Mac installation page a couple of days ago, and noticed that there was no mention of MacPorts <http://www.macports.org/>. They currently have octave 2.9.9 and octave-forge 2006.07.09.

Fundamentally it is possible to build octave as a .pkg or .mpkg for Apple's Installer.app. I did this several years ago. I later pulled this .mpkg due to the duplication of effort with my normal .tar.gz based install system. The real problem is coming up with the file list. You can't just package up everything in /usr/local, so you need to build into a separate tree. This is a bit of a chore, since you have to add a lot of configuration arguments and environmental  variables. My coworkers at Boston University use this approach for CISM_DX - which currently includes octave 2.1.72 - see <http://www.bu.edu/cism/cismdx/>. Alternately, you can use a utility to find changed files, such as afick. However, it may miss files that were not overwritten during the install process.

Note that MacPorts can build .pkg files. This may be the simplest approach. However, it installs everything into /opt/local...

Marius

--

Marius Schamschula

Webmaster

The Huntsville Macintosh Users Group

www.hmug.org

webmaster at hmug dot org

marius at schamschula dot com