Re: Installation of 3.8.2 on Mac

[c.]

On 26 Nov 2014, at 20:01, Bradley Giesbrecht <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Carlo,
> 
> Any chance of getting some history of what has been tried and the results?

The last version for which we had a working relocatable .app bundle was 3.2.3
That version was generated via custom bash scripts that was initially created 
by Thomas Treichl.

That script and related work can still be found in the repository on Octave 
Forge here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/octave/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/octave-forge/admin/MacOSX/Octave.app/
http://sourceforge.net/p/octave/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/octave-forge/admin/MacOSX/Octave.app/dmgpacker/

The resulting distribution is also on OctaveForge, here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/octave/files/Octave%20MacOSX%20Binary/2009-10-03%20binary%20of%20Octave%203.2.3/

That did not fail it was just abandoned short after Thomas gave up maintainance 
as nobody cared enough
to take over (Someone used similar scripts to create a 3.4.0 bundle at some 
point IIRC).

Since 3.8.0 I started generating bundles using macports' 'port mpkg' feature 
and Packages.app.
The .mpg installs all libraries and executable in /usr/local/octave/<version 
number> and a launcher
is installed in /Applications.

To make this work I have to maintain a few local patched PortFiles but the rest 
is essentially handled
just by MacPorts, which makes this much easier to maintain (IMHO) than the 
previous approach.

On the other hand this does not produce a self contained, relocatable .app 
bundle which would be cleaner.

> I see the "Octave Maintainers List <address@hidden>", would this be a good 
> list for me to follow Mac OS X issues?

That is not Mac OS X specific, but topics related to Mac OS X do come up here 
quite often lately.
You can also have a look at the Octave trackers on savannah for issues related 
to the OSX version of Octave.
Some discussion also went on in the MacPorts tracker.

> --
> Brad
c.