[OctDev] Re: A new standalone octave for 2.1.60, and setup.

[Paul K. <pki...@us...>]

Ole,

Here's an outline of what needs to be done for a new Windows release.

I'm CC'ing Brian Bliss and the octave-forge list in case anyone wants
to help you.

I've put my compilation of octave-2.1.60.tar.bz2 into the root
of waterthrill.  Expand it in the /opt directory.  I get a
"Permission denied" error when I quit octave.  Let me know if
it works better for you.

The symbolic linking stuff isn't finished yet.  I didn't realize
earlier that octave was doing hard links.  Cygwin soft links
might install automatically, but it may be that link implementation
might be windows version specific so we may need to force the link
during install.  I've updated the link scripts generated by
make to remove the old symlink before installing the new.  I'm attaching
mklinks.sh for converting the /opt/octave-2.1.60/base/oct via

	$ source mklinks.sh

when in that directory.  This should be run from the current
build script but it isn't. The current post-install script runs
mklinks again in the right directories, but this is untested.

I know the octave.nsi NSIS script is broken.  I've been hacking at
it without testing it.  I thought it was better to post and not
lose what I was working on since we didn't really have a
working build anyway.

You will need to do some work to make sure the proper directories
are installed. cygwin, bin, base and site should do it.  E.g.,

	SetOutPath $INSTDIR\bin
     FILE /r "${ROOT}\opt\octave-${VERSION}\bin\*.*"

Next you will have to set the Cygwin registry keys so that the
appropriate directories are mounted.  E.g.,

	/bin -> $INSTDIR/cygwin
     /usr/bin -> $INSTDIR/bin
	/opt/octave-${VERSION} -> $INSTDIR
	/ -> $INSTDIR
	/home -> $DOCUMENTS

I'm not entirely convinced this will work.  Can you have /usr/bin
without having /usr?  Can you have / and /opt/octave-2.1.60 pointing
to the same directory?

Make sure to create directories for tmp and for the users octave
files:

	CreateDirectory $INSTDIR\tmp.
	CreateDirectory $DOCUMENTS\octave

Make sure that CreateDirectory doesn't fail if the directory
already exists, or empty it if it does --- we wouldn't want to
delete the user's private octave scripts.  Presumably the HOME
environment variable should be set to /home/octave.  Somewhere
there is a system startup file which should automatically include
/home/octave on the octave path.

Eliminate as much as you can from the octave_install.sh script.
I bet NSIS is capable of doing everything we need.  Particularly,
setting up an editor and predefining all the constants for edit.m
would be nice.

Figure out what's up with the o|c|t|a|v|e|>| prompt which
people sometimes see.

We should be able to do a drop-in replacement with the atlas dlls.
I haven't constructed the atlas dlls so I've never tried this.
We should make sure we don't overwrite lapack.dll when we do the
replacement.

Be sure to test both system install and user install.

I would like a nag screen asking for Octave donations. 30000
downloads x $10/year is 3 full time employees working on octave.

I'm not going to discuss the requirements for a dev release here.

This should be enough to get you started, but I'm sure there are
other details.  There is a reason I haven't done a release in a
while 8-)  Once we work out the kinks in this release, it will be
smooth sailing in the future.

- Paul

On Oct 27, 2004, at 6:11 PM, Ole Jacob Hagen wrote:

> You can send me your standalone there...
> Which version of NSIS are you using? I am using the new release....It 
> doesn't work properly...Have to edit the nsi-file...
>