Re: Comments on the Mac installation instructions on the wiki

[Marius Schamschula]

On Apr 14, 2007, at 3:57 AM, David Bateman wrote:

Thomas Treichl wrote:

- Who is interested to host MacOSX binary on server? OctaveForge?

Sure, why not host it on sourceforge, though I have two concerns

1) All binary releases of GPL code must have available all of the source

code needed to rebuild them. So you'll need a source code bundle ideally

 available from the same location as the binary itself. I'm not sure

what sourceforge policy is on distributed such bundles particularly for

programs like Octave with lots of external dependencies, its likely to

be rather large (if rarely downloaded)....

That's why everything at hmug.org comes with all the source code. However, many projects hosted at SourceForge have .dmg disk image with the installer. I have not paid enough attention to tell if all include the source code as well. Some certainly do, while others may not (not everything at SourceForge is under GPL). For an octave.app release this would certainly involve a number of packages. It could be in a directory with a number of gzipped tarballs, or as a .pkg installer file.

2) Isn't there other sites that Mac users know better as download

locations for MacOS binaries? In that case, wouldn't octave get better

exposure on one of these?

New Mac software is usually announced at VersionTracker and MacUpdate. Thus, a large number of potential users will be made aware of new releases. Also note that Freshmeat has a Mac OS X section as well.

Marius

--

Marius Schamschula

Webmaster

The Huntsville Macintosh Users Group

www.hmug.org

webmaster at hmug dot org

marius at schamschula dot com

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