Some notes as you're working on this -- I did go through a bit of this before:

• I would use ppa:octave/stable instead of ppa:picaso/octave. The latter is only on 3.6.1 -- IIRC Java support became builtin only in Octave 3.8 (before that it was a separate package). That's also why you get the error about --no-gui.
• The magic tests still use Matlab even if USE_OCTAVE=1. Either exclude them or fix the magic to support Octave too

Thanks!

By the way @isbadawi, Octave magic is now working 😄

Ready to roll!

Looks good overall, but I'm not sure I like the Octave and Ubuntu specific make.py you added. I think it would be better to generalize the other make.py so that it can build the Octave messenger if needed. I also feel like installing system dependencies shouldn't be make.py's responsibility.

We can address that later though -- getting tests to run on Travis is more important. Thanks for working on this!

I agree it is a bit of a hack, my plan was to get it working on Windows next and devise a more general solution. I do not have access to a Mac. I agree the apt-get belongs in the documentation as opposed to the make file.

First of all, this is great.

Second - this Octave thing now doesn't work on my machine (a mac), because
of that apt-get. If this is just for travis, can't we move the apt-get into
the .travis.yml file, and then set up whether you use the matlab for mex
generation or octave with mkoctfile through the local.cfg file?

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 7:57 AM, Steven Silvester [email protected]
wrote:

I agree it is a bit of a hack, my plan was to get it working on Windows
next and devise a more general solution. I do not have access to a Mac. I
agree the apt-get belongs in the documentation as opposed to the make file.

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