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Re: Windows binaries and 3.2.4


From: PhilipNienhuis
Subject: Re: Windows binaries and 3.2.4
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:50:13 -0700 (PDT)

Rik wrote:
> 
> 10/27/11
> 
> It seems that there has been great success in getting 3.4.3 to build on
> Windows platforms.  Is it safe to point Windows users to this new
> distribution?
> 

"Safe" in the sense that we'll avoid having many simple questions asked
repeatedly (I guess that's your actual motive) - no.

Yet Nitzan has included clear instructions, and limited in number as well -
Windows users with fairly basic proficiency should be able to get Octave up
and running.
IMO the value of such great free software as Octave largely outweighs a
little inconvenience with installation.

Besides, the more testers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H users the better, and the sooner
real bugs are uncovered.

So from a practical POV I'm all in favor of your suggested move.


But I also have doubts:

While Tatsuro and Nitzan have done a great job so far, I think a few things
have to done:

- Fixing bug #34631 - Not only for me that's a real showstopper, unwary
Windows users may also run into this bug after having created a sufficient
number of plots: then Octave can get things mixed up without warning. The
more complicated the plots, the sooner this bug will manifest itself.
Note that this bug affects both gnuplot and OpenGL.

- Currrently the 3.4.3 is still a (or two) .7z file(s). 
I still think an installer has to built out of it, to set installation
directory, paths, at first run create and in next runs set default current
working directory (%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Octave subdir), allowing to
select packages, etc. 
Otherwise we'll probably be answering over and over again how to do these
(for us simple) things.

- Including & connecting to an editor (e.g., notepad++) would be great.
Another thing we shouldn't expect Octave novices to be able to handle by
themselves.

Perhaps Benjamin left some instructions on how to do build an installer
incl. editor on OctaveForge (I don't know).
I do not think that building an installer (e.g. using NSIS) is very hard.
IIRC there's a problem with localization (reported a while ago).

For Linux users this may all seem overdone, but the situation is that in the
Windows world, the layout of systems is much more heterogeneous and
unpredictable.
To cope with that, more complete and self-contained installers are required
than in many other OSes. Perhaps this can be seen as a sort of post-build
"./configure" that just can't be done during build itself.

Philip


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