Re: Octave 3.4.2-rc1 release candidate available for ftp

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-Jun-2011, Lukas Reichlin wrote:

| I've built octave-3.4.2-rc1 successfully on Mac OS X 10.6.7 using a
| modified version of MacPorts' octave-devel Portfile (attached).
| I've chosen the +gcc45 option.  I'm able to compile and run
| successfully my oct-files from the control package.

Thanks.

Here are a few comments about the options you are using:

| configure.args      --without-x \
|                     --enable-shared \
|                     --enable-dl \
|                     --disable-docs \
|                     --disable-openmp

Both --enable-shared, --enable-dl, and --disable-openmp are defaults,
and the --enable-openmp appears to have no effect anyway.

| ### the following are probably not necessary (except possibly the
| ### 'cholmod' one), but are included for completion.  Ordering is the
| ### same as in './configure --help'.
| configure.args-append \
|                     --enable-readline \
|                     --enable-extra-warning-flags \
|                     --with-qhull \
|                     --with-z \
|                     --with-hdf5 \
|                     --with-fftw3 \
|                     --with-fftw3f \
|                     --with-glpk \
|                     --with-curl \
|                     --with-blas \
|                     --with-lapack \
|                     --with-qrupdate \
|                     --with-amd \
|                     --with-camd \
|                     --with-colamd \
|                     --with-ccolamd \
|                     --with-cholmod="-lcholmod -lmetis" \
|                     --with-cxsparse \
|                     --with-umfpack \
|                     --with-arpack

These are defaults except for the --with-cholmod="-lcholmod -lmetis"
option, and that should not be used if you are building a binary for
redistribution since the METIS library is not distributed under terms
that are GPL compatible.

| ### the following are probably not necessary, but are included for
| ### completion.
| # octave uses a number of other ports to create sources from template:
| # perl, gawk, gsed, flex, bison, texinfo.  python is not used if perl
| # is available, so clear it out.  FLTK doesn't work as of 1.3.x-r7794,
| # so disable it entirely (via "no" here and a configure patch).
| configure.perl      ${prefix}/bin/perl
| configure.python    ' '
| configure.awk       ${prefix}/bin/gawk
| configure.env-append SED="${prefix}/bin/gsed" \
|                      TEXI2DVI="${prefix}/bin/texi2dvi" \
|                      TEXI2PDF="${prefix}/bin/texi2pdf" \
|                      FLTK_CONFIG=no

Except for FLTK_CONFIG=no the configure script should find these, so
there should be no need to specify them.

| variant debug description {Produce debugging information in compiled code} {
|     configure.cflags-delete    -O2
|     configure.cxxflags-delete  -O2
|     configure.fflags-delete    -O2
|     configure.fcflags-delete   -O2
|     configure.f90flags-delete  -O2
|     configure.objcflags-delete -O2
|     configure.cflags-append    -g3 -O0
|     configure.cxxflags-append  -g3 -O0
|     configure.fcflags-append   -g3 -O0
|     configure.f90flags-append  -g3 -O0
|     configure.fflags-append    -g3 -O0
|     configure.objcflags-append -g3 -O0
| }

What is the effect of this?  If you are disabling compiler
optimization when building Octave, then you are really making it much
slower.  To get good performance, Octave depends heavily on code
inlining and other compiler optimizations which I think will not
happen with -O0.

jwe