On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 8:20 AM Kai Torben Ohlhus <
address@hidden> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 2:37 PM CROZIER Richard <
address@hidden> wrote:
This may be controversial, but have you considered offering a version of
Octave through the windows App store for a charge? This would be a
charge for convenience since users could still download from the website.
Richard
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
Can you just upload the "octave-5.1.0-w64-installer.exe" installer there or does it take some extra effort?
Otherwise I think that would be a convenient way of donation.
It will likely be a bit more involved than that. Windows Apps live in a sandboxed environment, are installed in a hidden/admin locked folder, and generally operate with different overall permissions. I have no idea how package management would work in that environment. It would require someone to register with a MS developer account (one time not-too-large fee). There is apparently a process for packaging a desktop program for Universal Windows Platform[1] including a Desktop App Converter[ 2]. Maybe this isn't any more messy than the packaging done on Linux systems. But I doubt it.
More details on 'behind the scenes' filesystem behavior to sandbox the app package update/installation as it is now would simply not work. program folder structure is read-only. local changes can be made/stored in user/AppData, so some settings would be preserved, but no local .octaverc changes, etc. I don't know if there's anything else this would break. While it doesn't seem that any core octave behaviors would run afoul of Windows store restrictions (no game emulators/browsers mainly), we probably wouldn't know until running a full test suite with an App'd version.