Re: GSoC: Improve binary packaging on Mac OS X

[Anirudha Bose]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:00 AM, Ben Abbott <address@hidden> wrote:

On Aug 5, 2013, at 4:17 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> On 5 August 2013 16:14, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I am not a Mac user, so maybe my questions might seem lame to everyone. The
>> Macports website says "We provide a single software tree that attempts to
>> track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute ...
>> targeting mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.8, A.K.A. Mountain Lion)
>> and the immediately previous two (10.7, A.K.A. Lion and 10.6, A.K.A. Snow
>> Leopard)." Doesn't this mean that we can get Octave's dependencies for
>> different versions of Mac OS?
>
> Yes, but the point of your project, as I understand it, was to make it
> possible for anyone to build Octave and not depend on external package
> management. MXE is supposed to do this.
>
> - Jordi G. H.

Also, using the Macports approach you'd need different Mac's to create the different bundles for different versions of MacOSX. When I began working on a bundle using Macports, I expected it would be straight forward, but it turned out to be clumsy and unreliable.

Even if we use MXE, it will require us to install XCode4 and Macports first to get all the basic GNU tools required to natively compile Octave. AFAIK to install the required tools, one needs to do something like

    sudo port install coreutils autoconf automake ...

I expect using MXE will be less frustrating (but I haven't used it myself).

Ben