Re: plans for release

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Feb-2011, Richard Campbell wrote:

| I'd like to see Jarno's blaswrap.c included in the Octave source, and used
| automatically when the user runs ./configure for a 64-bit Octave on a machine
| where the Apple-provided BLAS is the only one detected.

It would probably be good to also verify that the detected BLAS won't
work, so that if it is fixed in the future the wrapper won't be
needed.

| Other than that, if
| these things below are addressed in configure, then a user should be able to
| walk themselves through building Octave on a vanilla OSX machine without 
having
| to dig through this board:
| 
| a) -D_REENTRANT appended to CXXFLAGS
| b) -ff2c appended to FFLAGS in 32 bit mode (when not using blaswrap.c)
| c) --disable-readline implied if GNU readline isn't detected, rather than
| erroring out
| d) --disable-docs implied if ghostscript isn't found, rather than erroring out
| e) GNU PCRE required rather than optional

I thought there was a check for the -ff2c option, but I don't see it
now.  I guess I was confusing this with the -fdefault-integer-8 option,
which we do attempt to check for automatically if --enable-64 is used
and the compiler is gfortran.

There are other things besides ghostscript that will result in failing
to build the docs, so the check would have to be for more than just
ghostscript.

I don't object to any of these and would certainly consider a patch,
but I don't think I will work on any of them myself before the
release.

jwe