Re: Valid set of "octave" and "octave-forge" RPMS for FC3 and FC4?

[Quentin Spencer]

Rick Niles wrote:

> So looking through old mailing lists it appears there was a problem 
> with Octave as shipped with Fedora Core 3.  I'm just very suprised 
> after more than 10 years of development I can't find set of binary 
> RPMS for octave and octave-forge "blessed" to work with FC3 (or FC4).  
> I understand someone took the responsibility for maintaning 
> octave/octave-forge for Fedora Extras as octave has been dropped from 
> Fedora Core 4, but I couldn't find any of those packages.   I also 
> understand that many Octave developers (including John) are "build it 
> from the source" kinda people, but in the corporate world it's lot 
> easier if you can just point the support staff to a set of binary RPMS 
> and say "install that".

OK, For FC3, go to ftp://coffee.phys.unm.edu/pub/octave/RPMS/i386/ and 
"install that" :). The problem with octave on FC3 was not really with 
octave but with blas and lapack (some might say it was really with gcc). 
The RPMs I just referred to should give you an up-to-date installation 
with octave-forge and working blas/lapack. Sorry it's not well 
advertized--it's sort of a temporary solution (see below).

> Can we get something like "FreshRPMS.net" for octave?  It would have 
> distro specific binary packages for octave & octave-forge updated 
> regularly. (Note: I'm not voluteering to do this. :) )

Yes, you're right. I'm the Fedora octave maintainer, and that's the idea 
behind the Fedora Extras project which has finally got off the ground 
during the last few months. The idea is to get octave, octave-forge, and 
related packages into Fedora Extras so they will be updated regularly. 
I'm told that FC4 should have the Extras repositories enabled by 
default, so you should be able to do a install of octave with apt or yum 
right out of the box (I haven't installed FC4 and tried it yet). Octave 
2.1.71 is ready to be built and released to the repositories, but there 
have been compile problems on x86_84 (problems with the build system, 
not octave) that have prevented a release. I really hope all of this 
will be resolved within the next week or so. The only hang-up with 
octave-forge right now is Extras' review process--basically you have to 
get someone else to review it, and I've had a hard time getting the 
interest of other Fedora people to get a review. (If someone wanted to 
help, they could become a Fedora Extras maintainer and review my 
packages:) ). When all of this finally happens, I'll post an 
announcement here.

-Quentin