Mac OS Binary

[hjenkins]

Hello, Sebastian Schöps,

Thank you very much indeed for the Octave binary. I have spent far too
much time trying to bodge around the lack of existence of such a thing,
and was resorting to a VM, which was too slow. Your package just worked,
installing it with the doubleclick GUI; I didn't even install Homebrew, or
anything else, first (I do have Fink installed, but very little else apart
from what the system came with). It would be great to have it up on
http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_MacOS_X as a stand-alone package as
well.

I am using Mac OS X 10.10.5 on a MacBook Pro 13" from the first half of 2015.

I have Eugenio and John's panel title overlap problem which they
illustrated in their screenshots.

I do not have Ray's problem with command-line launches; with or without a
GUI, it works as expected, and multiple copies of Octave run just fine
simultaneously. Some longish scripts that do not involve plotting ran
fine.

I also have Ray's plot problem; tested using

x = -10:0.1:10;
plot (x, sin (x));

Given these commands, the GUI hangs indefinitely. I can send you the full
error report produced when I killed it, if you want it.

Given the same task, the command line does not hang, and gives this error:

Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
Fontconfig warning: ignoring UTF-8: not a valid region tag
warning: could not match any font: *-normal-normal-10
warning: called from
    axes at line 66 column 10
    gca at line 58 column 9
    newplot at line 148 column 8
    plot at line 219 column 9

Followed by a string of these errors:
warning: could not match any font: *-normal-normal-10
warning: ft_render: unable to load appropriate font

Interspersed with the odd:
warning: ft_render: invalid bounding box, cannot render

However, on the third try, it did indeed render the sine wave. On the
second try, and when I tried to add a cosine to the third try, it crashed
to the system prompt with:
panic: Segmentation fault: 11 -- stopping myself...
attempting to save variables to 'octave-workspace'...
save to 'octave-workspace' complete
Segmentation fault: 11

It then popped up a window reading "octave-gui wurde unerwartet beendet"
(octave-gui closed unexpectedly). I am running it in German, but I
certainly was not running the GUI. I can send you the full error report if
you want it (it is in English).

Running a really simple benchmark that Alexander Barth posted to this list
some time back;

tic
n = 200;
A = rand(n,n);
for i=1:1000
  A = A + rand(n,n) * rand(n,n);
end
toc

It's significantly faster on Octave than on Matlab.
Matlab (GUI)          Elapsed time is 2.573957 seconds.
Octave (GUI)          Elapsed time is 1.67156 seconds.
Octave (command-line) Elapsed time is 1.33937 seconds.

I need bit width format specifier support, and of course I can't patch the
binary, (obviously totally your fault :) ) so I very much hope you will
include Lachlan and Phillip's new C++ textscan/strread/textread in your
final build. https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?8783

I will continue to use your package and I'd be happy to run any tests you
send. Thank you for the work.

Regards,