Re: 3.6.0 release

[Ben Abbott]

On Nov 25, 2011, at 5:35 PM, Lukas Reichlin wrote:

> On 25.11.2011, at 14:07, Jarno Rajahalme wrote:
> 
>> On Nov 25, 2011, at 13:49 , ext Joaquim Luis wrote:
>> 
>>> Than the honest thing to do is to assume that and put clearly on the Octave
>>> page that Windows is not supported.
>> 
>> That would mean the Octave does not even compile on Windows. That would be 
>> going too far. Maybe the Octave page should just state that binary packages 
>> (on all platforms) are to be found elsewhere (links provided, but no promise 
>> that newest release is to be found there).
>> 
>> Having said that, I think that having binary packages for OSX and Windows is 
>> very important for Octave. I came on board with 3.2 on Windows and used the 
>> it to do my matlab assignments on my Ph.D. studies, while everyone else was 
>> using matlab...
>> 
>> Jarno
> 
> I agree on the second paragraph. Without Thomas Treichls Octave.app, I 
> wouldn't have started to use octave and there wouldn't be a revised control 
> package.
> 
> There should be an installer for Windows and an app for OSX. I mean a single, 
> self-contained binary without the need to install Cygwin or the "App Stores" 
> Macports and Fink with all their dependencies. The situation on Linux is 
> different to the situation on non-free systems Windows and Mac. The standard 
> way of obtaining software is the package manager, so users get the binaries 
> from the Linux distributors. Some have recent packages (Fedora) while others 
> have not (Debian -> Ubuntu).
> 
> Even if none of the octave developers wants to maintain binaries for Windows 
> and Mac, attention should be spent that one can build octave on these systems 
> without writing patches first.
> 
> Lukas

I would hope there are enough MacOS users / developers who follow this list 
that we should be able to automate the process for creating an app-bundle.

If that is going to happen, we'll need to a thread for that purpose, and a few 
committed volunteers.

Ben