OS X binaries [Was: Ready for wrap-up everyone?]

[Per P. <per...@ma...>]

On Apr 6, 2004, at 13:15, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Per Persson wrote:
>
>> Sorry, no time to do that now (I'm not really sure of the proper way 
>> to
>> do it). Will have to wait until after the release.
>
> Well, if anyone complains, we'll just blame you, then ;-)

No problem, I can handle that. ;-)

>
>> OTOH, nobody is expecting a binary for Mac OS X, I think.
>
> They're not?

With the emphasis on _expecting_, from the gnuplot team, and right from 
day one: No.
I bet they would _like_ a binary though.

> That's a surprise to me.

Well, you know our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear 
and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... [1]

>  I was under the impression Apple
> users were pretty much like those of Windows concerning wielding a
> compiler to get some program installed --- they consider it a dangerous
> thing only to be undertaken by experts.  What would be the purpose of 
> the
> "fink" project then?

You are pretty much right about this, although these days quite a few 
Mac users are from the Unix/Linux camp too.

>
> For releases before 4.0, MacOS users didn't have binaries provided by 
> the
> gnuplot team itself, and that was quite a mess which I think we really
> should try to avoid, if possible.

Yes, I agree.

> There were versions of gnuplot
> specially adapted to macintosh, but those changes were lost because 
> they
> never were brought back into the mainline sources.

I'd like to get this right and just throwing something together for 
friday or even next friday seems a bad idea. Just to get things 
started, I'll list the main options that comes to mind:


1) A static build of gnuplot.
	Standard double-clickable installer.
	Installs into /usr/local etc.
	Comes with a double clickable script[2] that can be freely moved 
around by the user.
	Static build may be trickier than it sounds, I don't know yet.	
2) A "normal" build of gnuplot.
	Standard double-clickable installer.
	Installs into /usr/local etc.
	Comes with a double clickable script[2] that can be freely moved 
around by the user.
	How do we solve deps?
	All the necessary libs in the installer?
	Better left for Fink, DarwinPorts etc.?

3) A "self contained" build of gnuplot.
	Drag'n drop install.
	All binaries and dependencies (libs) are wrapped up as a full 
application.
	The application can be freely moved around by the user.
	Hard to use with e.g. octave.

4) A full Gnuplot.app
	Drag'n drop install.
	All binaries and dependencies (libs) are wrapped up as a full 
application.
	Needs more code to fully behave like a "real" app, but not necessarily 
changes to the core code.
	Gnuplot.app can be freely moved around by the user.
	Hard to use with e.g. octave.

The last option (4) is what we had for 3.7, but that (carbonized) Mac 
gnuplot seem to have disappeared from the web.

For the "terminally-impaired", option (3) or (4) would be the most 
appropriate, as long as they don't need to interact with gnuplot from 
other programs.

To me, (2) is the preferred choice, but I suppose (1) is probably the 
least error-prone approach, should it work (I know it _sounds_ easy, 
but like I said, it could be tricky).

I'd appreciate feedback on this.

/Per




[1] http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/paulfitz/spanish/script.html

[2] To users, that script (proxy?) would in most respects act like a 
true application.