Re: Packaging Octave for Windows and OS X (was: writing integer with fwrite)

[John W. Eaton]

On 14-Dec-2004, Joe Koski <address@hidden> wrote:

| Some personal observations. The Fink project has at least two major issues
| that need to be resolved before it is useful to the casual user. First, the
| "stable" releases are usually very old, and the "unstable" release and
| octave-forge have to be built from source with the fink supplied make file
| equivalents (no time saving). Second, fink is not as user friendly as a UNIX
| make file, especially if you are trying to install "unstable" items.
| 
| With fink you are fighting for server connection time with people
| downloading OpenOffice, games, gimp, etc. There is one poor harried person
| who tries to answer the multitude of new user questions, and that person
| usually just points to an unrecognizable FAQ on the large list. There is
| also the issue of installing and managing the fink software on your system
| in their separate /sw directory of files, where programs are compatible with
| each other, but often incompatible with stuff that lives in /usr and
| /usr/local.

I think the solution to these problems is to provide more resources
for the Fink project.  If people want things to get better, they have
to help out in some way.  Debian would have been dead long ago if
people had waited for Ian to do everything.

| Another personal opinion. Since Linux and OS X share gcc, gnu make, and
| (more recently) the bash shell, creating a make file that would work for
| both sytems should not be that difficult. Admittedly, Apple doesn't help by
| constantly tweaking gcc and OS X to get ready for 64 bit computing (Tiger).

Don't most systems that use Autoconf configure scripts come close to
this already?

| The common Linux/OS X make file approach for the "you probably want this
| one" versions of octave and octave-forge on sourceforge would be my vote for
| a "Mac friendly" installer of octave.

It seems to me that it would be more effective to improve Fink and
wrap apt-get (or whatever the Fink package system uses) in a "Mac
friendly" way rather than re-inventing an installer for every package.

jwe



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