Standalone windows install: why?

[John W. Eaton]

On 31-Mar-2005, Brian Blais <address@hidden> wrote:

| I would *love* to have a standalone windows install more recent than the 
|   2.1.50, without having to do a cygwin install (and I'll check out the 
| one posted), and I don't even run windows.

Do you mean that you want a simple way to install Octave on Windows,
or that you want an Octave binary that does not depend on Cygwin at
all?

| The reason is that I would really like to use octave in my teaching, and 
| to get a student who doesn't know a lot about computers to install 
| cygwin, and then octave, is extremely difficult.

OK, I'll concede this, but surely students can go to a web page and
download software to install?  Accept defaults and click the "next"
button until they finally click a "finish" button, then wait a few
minutes while things are downloaded and installed?

If the download time is too long, you can put everything they need on
a CD and install from that.

If the sequence of menu options is too long, then we should be able to
build a customized Cygwin setup.exe that simplifies the process.

So rather than eliminate Cygwin, it seems to me that it would be best
to package Octave for Cygwin, then write an installer that simplifies
the task of installing the Octave package for Cygwin.

jwe



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