On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Philip Nienhuis <pr.nienh...@hccnet.nl>wrote:
> 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.
>
It's optional and can be deselected at installation time. MSYS is really
only used to provide support for the "pkg" system, which requires a shell.
If you already have MSYS available, you can use it instead.
Michael.
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