Having passed the mid-term evaluations of GSoC, it is time to start my work on making Octave available for Mac OS X. I have never used a Mac, so I will utilize the coming days in studying about the build system of Mac OS X. Thanks to the Director of our university for giving me access to a Mac Pro at Mobile Computing Lab. I have full physical access to it till 5pm. After that, I am permitted to use the machine through TeamViewer/SSH/Telnet (I haven’t figured it out yet).
At this moment, creating a new Mac OS X App Bundle using Macports seems most practical to me. App bundles are directory hierarchies, with the top-level directory having a name that ends with a .app extension. Using Macports, we can produce binary packages with standalone installers that are pre-compiled. The final app bundle doesn’t require Macports to be installed on the target system. All the dependencies will be a part of the bundle. A dmg disk image of the fiinal package is also desirable. The .app bundle can also be run directly like any normal app without any installation. This is just like executing the file bin/octave.exe in Windows version of Octave, where all the dependencies are pre-built.
There is a real app bundle already existing for Octave 3.2 by Thomas Treichl. I am not sure if working on this will be a good idea. It is very old and I have known that the scripts in it might not work properly for newer versions of Octave, while digging up the mailing list. As of now, using Macports seems a good option to me. It also has some great documentation to help me get started. I also know that Ben Abbott had used this approach to produce working app bundles for Octave. I will discuss about the project with the Octave community and write another blog article about what I am going to do exactly in this second half of GSoC.
GNU Octave: Improve Binary Packaging 