Hello.
I am a would-be contributor trying to get up and going. I have had
running on an Intel Mac for some time. Most recently I've been
running ver. 3.0.0, with the operating system being OS 10.4.11. I'm
quite sure that, since having an Intel Mac, I've only obtained Octave
in a universal binary form (.dmg file from SourceForge).
This all began when I wanted to get Yaog. When running the configure
script, I got the error message
configure: error: Octave-config or mkoctfile not found! Check
your octave installation!
I thought that perhaps mkoctfile could not be found because I had not
compiled from source and, even if that is not the issue, release
3.0.1 is out, so probably I should be working with the most recent
stuff anyway, right? Moreover, I got interested originally seeing a
need for more image functionality. I have not kept up on the
discussion surrounding imread/imwrite (time available for getting
going on this had to wait until May), but what I gathered early on
was that external libraries were generally thought the way to go on
this. So it seems to me I should be writing/modifying Octave code
rather than just .m files. Anyway, whether I am correct about all
this or not, I decided to compile v. 3.0.1 from source, and that is
where my immediate difficulties lie.
I have some experience compiling from source, but mostly in linux,
though even there I have stuck to debian-based distributions and used
the apt package-managing system whenever possible. On my Mac, I have
generally stuck to using fink (or apt-get) or macports.
On my first attempt to run the Octave 3.0.1 configure script, I got
the message
configure: WARNING: I need GNU Readline 4.2 or later
configure: error: this is fatal unless you specify --disable-readline
So, I used apt-get to download and install readline v. 4.3. However,
subsequent runs of "configure" brought the same warning message. I
next removed the readline package, and downloaded the source tarball
for readline v. 5.2, thinking perhaps that if the readline libraries
were placed in a different (more standard) location, the configure
script could find what it needed. Though the readline installation
(from source) went smoothly, it seemed not to have any effect on the
results of "./configure" for Octave. So, I next ran "./configure --
disable-readline". While I do not think I would have been happy with
the resulting program (lack of editing and history) even if that had
fixed the only problem, I received many new warnings
configure: WARNING: command editing and history features require GNU
Readline
configure: WARNING: UMFPACK not found. This will result in some lack
of functionality for sparse matrices.
configure: WARNING: COLAMD not found. This will result in some lack
of functionality for sparse matrices.
configure: WARNING: CCOLAMD not found. This will result in some lack
of functionality for sparse matrices.
configure: WARNING: CHOLMOD not found. This will result in some lack
of functionality for sparse matrices.
configure: WARNING: CXSparse not found. This will result in some lack
of functionality for sparse matrices.
configure: WARNING: FFTW library not found. Octave will use the
(slower) FFTPACK library instead.
configure: WARNING: GLPK library not found. The glpk function for
solving linear programs will be disabled.
configure: WARNING: HDF5 library not found. Octave will not be able
to save or load HDF5 data files.
configure: WARNING: PCRE library not found. This will result in some
loss of functionality for the regular expression matching functions.
configure: WARNING: Qhull library not found --- This will result in
loss of functionality of some geometry functions.
So where does one get all of these things if they are not provided
with Octave? Has anyone had similar issues installing on a Mac, or
know an appropriate workaround?
Thomas L. Scofield
octave.info