Re: Packaging Octave for Windows and OS X (was: writing integer with fwrite)

[Paul Kienzle]

On Dec 14, 2004, at 5:00 PM, Andy Adler wrote:

> On 14 Dec 2004, John W. Eaton wrote:
>
> > On 14-Dec-2004, Andy Adler <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > | - The code bloat problem. A static compiled octave is _much_
> > |   smaller and _much_ more responsive than a dynamically compiled
> > |   octave. OTOH, dynamic octave allows more flexibility, which
> > |   pluggable ATLAS, FFTW etc.
> > |
> > |   This problem is so bad that I find that I'm still mostly
> > |   using the static compiled 2.1.42 version that I made 2 years ago.
> >
> > I was not aware of this problem.  When I run Octave built with shared
> > libraries on a Windows system, it seems as responsive as the version I
> > have on a Debian system.  OTOH, the .oct files do seem to be
> > considerably larger.  For a very simple one, I see about 220k on the
> > Windows system vs. 11k for the Debian version (both are stripped).
> > Does anyone know what is causing this?
>
> You are right; the dynamically linked version is as responsive.
> I mean that it takes much longer to load. From the shell, I have
> a function that does things like
>
>     echo "1+1" | octave -q
>
> This takes much longer with the dynamically linked version.

What John is seeing is a statically compiled libstdc++.  On my
version I see file sizes of 30k to 130k vs. 10k to 110k on Linux,
which is only 20k extra overhead per file.

Startup times are worse with 2.1.64 at 15 s rather than 10 s for
2.1.50a.  Of this, 5 s is starting the interpreter and the rest
is traversing the octave install tree looking for functions and
PKG_ADD files.  In contrast, 2.1.63+octave-forge for Debian on a
similar machine takes a little over 1 s.  I don't have a static
octave available to compare with, nor a MinGW compile.

> > | - The windows custom/cygwin problem. We would like to have a
> > |   version for cygwin, and also one that has a custom NSIS based
> > |   installer.
> >
> > Why?  What advantage does an NSIS installer have over creating Cygwin
> > packages and using the Cygwin installer?
>
> The NSIS installer provides an *.exe installer that works the way
> windows users expect (and is less complicated to explain than the
> cygwin installer). It makes links to 'octave' the way a windows Matlab
> user is used to.
>
> To be honest, when I'm using a 'foreign' computer, and I need a
> quick install of octave, I choose the NSIS version rather than
> the cygwin installer.

Agreed.  Cygwin is cumbersome to install and I prefer not to have
the support costs of explaining it to the end users of my software.
It's bad enough that I have to explain Octave when what they really
want is the application software.

I have been plugging away at the install process over the past year.
The octave-forge download site contains precompiled supporting 
libraries.
The admin/Windows directory contains a Makefile which does all the
work of building a new octave for windows release.  The install script
still needs some work (like testing it for example), then it will be
ready for a new release.

> Now that I think about it, the best would be an NSIS installer
> that automatically gets the latest cygwin package and installs
> it into a custom minimal cygwin environment.

How about an NSIS installer which can create a link to 
/opt/octave-2.1.xx
in the existing cygwin, and link the binary to /usr/bin/octave?

- Paul



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