Re: Octave 4.2 binary + all packages in Linux ?

[John W. Eaton]

On 04/13/2017 03:03 AM, roland65 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> on Windows, Octave 4.2.x + all packages are available in one big zip archive
> or exe install. So, it's straightforward to install the whole thing.
>
> On Linux, I didn't find any place to download Octave 4.2.x + all packages.
> Distributions like Debian or Ubuntu still provide 4.0.x and individual
> packages.
>
> So, I believe we should have the same facility as in Windows to install the
> latest Octave + packages in one single binary archive, just like LibreOffice
> or Mozilla Firefox.
>
> Does it make sense to you? Is it feasible (I guess there should be library
> compatibility issues)?

As others have noted, we think this is the wrong approach for Linux 
systems that have proper package management.  If you are unhappy that 
your distribution doesn't provide updated packages for Octave, then it 
seems the proper thing to do is create them.

As others have also said, for systems like Windows that don't have 
proper package management systems, there is really no other alternative. 
 But it's far from ideal, because then every application bundles 
dependencies.

Even so, I extended mxe-octave to allow native builds of Octave and all 
dependencies on Linux systems because a paying customer wanted what you 
want: a more or less self-contained binary distribution on systems that 
did not have the necessary dependencies.  But there are many problems in 
trying to do this.  So far, I've only managed to build a package like 
that for particular systems, not one that will run on any system.  The 
client originally had RHEL 5 and SuSE 10 systems, now they have RHEL 6 
and SuSE 11, so I build for those.  If you are interested, I could help 
you do the same for the systems you use.  Or maybe we could work more 
toward a "universal binary" that would work on any system.  Contact me 
privately and we can discuss it further.

In any case, I'm not interested in doing that work as a volunteer, nor 
am I interested in distributing such a package officially from the 
Octave ftp site.

Currently, when building for Linux systems, mxe-octave builds nearly all 
dependencies except for the C library, OpenGL libraries and most X11 
libraries.  At one point I tried to build X11 and OpenGL libraries, but 
gave up when I realized that building OpenGL libraries was pointless if 
people were using the proprietary nvidia drivers and the nvidia OpenGL 
library.

I think the better thing to do might be a docker instance, but then I 
think you can just end up installing another OS inside the one you are 
already running, which seems pretty silly.  And that doesn't solve all 
problems for older systems anyway, because as I understand it, docker 
requires a sufficiently new kernel.

jwe