Re: Octave-3.6.1 for Windows (VS2008/VS2010) available

[Philip Nienhuis]

Michael Goffioul wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 12:22 AM, Philip Nienhuis<address@hidden>  wrote:
<snip>
> > Nitzan's MinGW binaries together constitute an almost 210 MB download; but
> > as MinGW is free, a complete MinGW environment incl. compilers&  rt libs
> > could be included. 18 MB of jars don't matter much then.
> >
> > OTOH your MSVC binary is beautifully small, but I suppose that is mainly
> > because it doesn't need much OS emulators and obviously you can't supply a
> > proprietary compiler with it. So users of your binary would have to do more
> > work anyway to get a complete Octave "environment".
>
> There is an embedded MSYS environment in the installer, just enough to
> run a shell and a few utilities. But indeed, the fact that there's no
> compilation environment in the installer is the main difference with
> MinGW. However, the compiler is ONLY needed if you plan to compile
> something against octave, which is not the case for most users.

Installing a newer release of an Octave-Forge package that contains 
binary modules comes to mind. I can easily imagine Joe Average User to 
attempt this.

>                    For
> users that do plan to compile something, they probably already have
> the compiler installed.

The main point would be:
How easy is it to connect Octave to this compiler? Would a user need to 
manually set environment vars, paths, etc, once MSVC has been installed? 
Or would Octave automagically know how to invoke it?
This is something that (IMO) belongs in a README and/or wiki.

Philip