Hello Bogdan: Bogdan wrote: > Hi, > > The MinGW "installer" for Octave is actually an archive containing MSYS > and also a lot of unnecessary items. Wouldn't it make more sense to only > distribute the binaries and instruct people to install MSYS and put them > there? Some of us already have MSYS installed.
Here: ^^^^^^^^^^ you wrote down your own answer. "some of us"; well the vast majority of Octave users on Windows didn't have MSYS installed beforehand. So for them this is a vital part of the installer archive. Admittedly there's some overhead inside. What's the problem with that? On this box I have a complete MinGW/MSYS development environment installed, plus 5 or 6 Octave-MinGW versions including MSYS + a lot more. It takes up a bit of disk space, true, but these days that shouldn't be a problem. All those MinGW/MSYS environments are not in each others way. I have run MinGW-Octave versions from 3.2.4 to 3.6.2 simultaneously w/o problems. The implications of your suggestion are that candidate Octave users, most of which are probably non-developers, should install MinGW, + MSYS, + Octave dependencies, + Octave, + gnuwin32, + gnuplot, + etc. etc. And with a next Octave version, which might be based on newer build tools, they may need to upgrade to newer MinGW/MSYS versions plus the rest as well. Now, the whole point of the MinGW-Octave installers was to make getting Octave as easy as possible for people who are only interested in Octave itself, rather than in the stuff it was based on. If you could compare the total number of Octave-MinGW installer downloads versus the number of pure MinGW/MSYS downloads you'd understand why this strategy has been so successful. BTW The MSVC version also contains MSYS. Philip ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
