[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #33018] ./configure considered broken

[anonymous]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?33018>

                 Summary: ./configure considered broken
                 Project: GNU Octave
            Submitted by: None
            Submitted on: Thu 07 Apr 2011 05:50:52 PM UTC
                Category: Configuration and Build System
                Severity: 3 - Normal
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: Reginald Beardsley
        Originator Email: address@hidden
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 3.4.0
        Operating System: Other

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Details:

FWIW

I've now spent over 30 hours trying to build 3.4.0 for Solaris 10 U8 x86 (the
last freely usable release by Sun).  I have all the dependencies built and
installed under /app.  This includes building gcc 4.5.0 from source with all
of its dependencies.

Just getting the Octave configure to run took almost 2 days.  Mostly because
of assumptions about installation of dependencies (e.g. /app/include/amd.h vs
/app/include/suitesparse/amd.h)  So that even though I specified
--with-amdincludes=/app/include, configure failed until I moved the headers.

The other major issue is the building of libraries.  At present, every time
make fails I build the .so, .la & .a by hand and restart make.  

The cause of the failures is not clear.  It centers around trying to build
shared libraries.  At the moment my guess is that some of the libraries were
not built w/ the flags presumed by Octave.  I encountered several such issues
building gcc.

Normally I would just write a quick shell script to do the build, but there
are enough files being generated on the fly w/o any obvious documentation that
I haven't tried that yet.  However, it looks as if that will ultimately be
necessary.

If Octave only works w/ a particular compiler and 4 operating systems, it is
hard for me to see much justification for the complexity of autoconf &
automake.   Given a simple Makefile for any of OS I could quickly modify it
for my environment.

Reg




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