Building on OSX without package managers

[Richard Campbell]

All,

My coworkers and I rely heavily on Octave.app from octave.sourceforge.net and I 
am becoming concerned that it's not being actively maintained. I am willing to 
take over the building of Octave.app from source but I'm having trouble with it 
and I want to know what the state of the art is for compiling Octave on OSX. 

I need a solution that doesn't require a third party package manager like Fink 
or Macports at either compile or runtime. I don't mind installing compile-time 
dependencies on one machine, but once I compile it I'd like to be able to 
package it up and run it on other Macs (like the existing Octave.app). Can 
Octave.app be built easily once Octave builds?

I've seen mention of a Readme.MacOS file on this board. Neither the current 
stable or testing source distributions from 
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html have this file included in 
them although I found the one at 
http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/e0e50f48df37/README.MacOS and it 
still says "TODO - add instructions" under "Building without a package manager".

I would very much like to be able to address variables larger than 2 GB on my 
machine with >>2 GB of RAM, so at a bare minimum I'd like to be able to compile 
Octave for myself with --enable-64.

Some nitpicks about what I've seen so far in trying to compile Octave from 
source:
- Why shouldn't the included versions of autoconf, automake, readline, sed &c. 
be sufficient for compiling Octave?
- I don't want Aquaterm to be the default, as X11 does just fine and is 
installed by default on all new Macs, and Aquaterm at first glance hasn't been 
maintained in about 5 years.
- The recommended Fortran compiler, which I already use for other things, gives 
the first 'configure' error when I try to build Octave from source. It's a 
different error wither or not I try --enable-64, but they're both about integer 
size.

R Campbell