Thu 10 Sep 2015 05:44:54 PM UTC, comment #1:
In addition to your wishes, here's some more:
- Being able to select the Start Menu subdir would be nice too. Presently the Octave shortcuts are dumped into the "main" Start Menu folder. I had a go at this some weeks back but it isn't quite as easy as I hoped it would be.
- Another Windows-specific issue that should be solved is bug #40444. It is the same category as your "Program Files" wish and I do not consider it a bug; Octave doesn't conform to Windows conventions but otherwise works fine.
Anyway you've presented a long list here. Good that you finally registered these long-known issues for reference.
The main problem to get them solved is that there aren't so many Octave-on-Windows developers - just three or four "part time" ones and maybe/probably I'm much too optimistic here.
Priority lies with maintaining Octave's core functionality on Windows; bells and whistles like nice installers have less appeal for most devs. Most of us here use an OS (Linux) that has all these issues solved (or avoided) in the distros by good and streamlined package managers.
As to some of your items:
installing to %Program Files% directory
"C:\Octave" isn't a fixed unmutable setting but rather a suggestion, one can easily adapt the installation directory during installation. AFAIK spaces in the installation directory path names are catched for good reason.
32bit/64bit:
When trying to building an unstripped (of debug symbols) installer lately I hit the NSIS 2 GB limit. That will surely happen as well when a combined 32/64 bit installer is built. FYI, a recent 64b development build for Windows incl. OF packages (stripped and all) already takes 1.86 GB disk space when installed.
I'm afraid this wish will lead to a much more complicated build-up of the installer. Maybe something like a stub that downloads the rest from the Internet could be a solution.
Spaces (and other characters) in path names:
I suppose large parts of Octave's I/O internals depend on the underlying system libs supplied by the MinGW project. If so, Octave can do only so much until this is fixed upstream.
Note that it is mostly when invoking binary modules that spaces in path names are an issue. I/O from/to files with spaces in the (path) names works perfectly AFAIK.
check boxes for packages
That was once implemented in the ancient 3.2.4 binary installer - shouldn't be hard to re-implement.
remove, repair, adjust
Isn't that supported only for .msi type installers? If so that's not going to make it with Octave as it is a proprietary system.
Changing Item group to "Feature request" as most of the mentioned issues do not obstruct Octave's functionality and one issue (spaces) looks to be an upstream issue;
Priority just a little lower;
Status => "Confirmed"
Title adapted
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