Re: Install status on Mac OS X 10.6.2

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Jan-2010, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

| It may be that providing 
| a binary is the best
| choice in any case.  Most Mac users do not expect to have to compile 
| from source.

Who will build and distribute the binary?

In any case, I think we should still try to make it as straightforward
as possible to build Octave.  One problem is the number of
dependencies.  Most GNU/Linux systems have adequate package managers
that make installing all the build dependencies fairly simple.

OS X systems have fink, macports, and what else?  But in my limited
experience, none were really good.  For example, I've tried using fink
in the past, but to get any remotely recent versions of the various
dependencies, you have to build nearly the entire fink system from
sources.  Compared to what is available on most GNU/Linux systems,
that's not a very friendly package management system.

The situation seems even worse on Windows systems without Cygwin, as
there doesn't appear to be anything that even approaches the fink
package system and everything is just "go to this list of random web
sites and download these things and try to build them and oh by the
way good luck".

jwe