From help-request at octave dot org Fri Mar 10 09:34:37 2006 Subject: Re: Octave for Windows HOWTO From: Quentin Spencer To: "John W. Eaton" CC: Agustin Barto , help@octave.org Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:25:57 -0600 John W. Eaton wrote: >On 10-Mar-2006, Quentin Spencer wrote: > >| One thing that often needlessly shows up in octave's dependency chain is >| tetex. This is because octave needs makeinfo for its help documentation. >| makeinfo is a relatively small program that's usually packaged as a part >| of a bigger texinfo package, which requires tetex, which often requires >| a big font package. This accounted for a lot of extra downloading the >| last time I tried a cygwin installation. I would check to make sure >| tetex is not installed, and if you wanted to go one step further, you >| could remove everything included in the texinfo package except makeinfo. >| I think breaking up packages like this could be controversial with >| people who understand and use cygwin, but I think the intended audience >| of your windows installer would not care. > >I think perhaps we should lobby for splitting makeinfo out of the >texinfo packages on all systems since it does not require TeX to work, >and it is useful by itself, so some people (like us) might want to >install makeinfo without having to install all of TeX. Would someone >like to take up that cause? > > I've already done that with Fedora recently, and it appears I was successful in convincing the packager to consider doing this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=178406 (who knows how long it will take for anything to happen, though). Cygwin and Debian users interested in this could probably make similar requests of their distributions. -Quentin ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------