Re: Octave-maintainers Digest, Vol 155, Issue 1

[Ian McCallion]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 at 15:06, Nicholas Jankowski <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 6:22 AM John Donoghue <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> On 2/1/19 2:50 AM, address@hidden wrote:
>>
>> gui starts by default now, so you want to create cmdline octave
>> shortcut, you would need the --no-gui option, otherwise no additional
>> options are required.
>>
> ok, do we recall at what version this changed back? The current instructions 
> say it was the other way for 4.4.0. Maybe should tidy that up for posterity 
> before moving it over to the [outdated] page.   Will add a note about 
> optionally creating a --no-gui shortcut if a CLI only one is desired, and 
> then have that be the instruction set for v5 when it goes live.
>
>>
>> >
>> > 2 - there is no more 'octave.bat' file, only octave.vbs. assuming this to
>> > be correct, reference the .bat can be removed for starting octave.
>> There is a bat file, how was moved to bin directory
>
> ok, will still remove reference to the bat for purpose of making manual 
> shortcuts.

One might ask why the .bat exists. If there is a good reason it should
be fixed to be compatible with the .vbs. It is not compatible in 4.4.1
 at least in the area of setup for qt5.

While looking at this area, perhaps these questions could be considered also:

1. Is it supported to launch octave from within another program rather
than just from a desktop icon of a commandline? If so it would be very
helpful if the parameters and the preparation work (environment
variables, etc) needed to launch the .exe directly was documented.
Without this it is necessary to reverse-engineer octave.vbs to find
the information.

2. Is it necessary to set up the HOME environment variable? I have not
found anything that breaks if not set

3. What is the purpose of octave-cli.exe and octave-cli-4.4.1.exe?
(Octave.vbs only calls octave-gui.exe, even for commandline)

Apologies if this is not the right place to raise these questions.

Cheers... Ian