Re: mkoctfile urgently needs attention before Octave 3.6.0 release

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2011/12/29 Lukas Reichlin <address@hidden>:
> On 29.12.2011, at 14:47, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
>> Don't panic. :-)
>>
>> Calm down.
>
> I'll do my very best ;-)
>
>>> In order to circumvent these problems, I propose the following
>>> solution that works from both Octave prompt and OS shell: Addition
>>> of a new option "--link-all-libs" to mkoctfile
>>
>> No, this is not the solution. We need to understand the actual
>> problem. You are proposing a heavy-handed solution because you don't
>> understand the actual problem, and neither do we. We should work to do
>> that instead of trying to revert to an old barbaric method of linking
>> that happened to work for your case.
>>
>> Marco has already proposed a solution that seems to work for other
>> cases. We are only missing yours.
>>
>> - Jordi G. H.
>
> I'm glad that Marco sent me a patch. But it's just a workaround for
> the problem, not a solution. It's not good when you have to resort
> to the shell, query some configuration variables and then feeding
> the result to the next call of mkoctfile.

This *is* a good solution. It's not something we invented for Octave.
For example, pkg-config also does the same thing for many other Unix
packages. It's also convenient. You could for example do

    mkoctfile foo.cc $(mkocfile -p BLAS_LIBS)

This is just how shells work.

> It should be possible from the Octave prompt and without tedious
> fiddling with intermediate variables.

I don't see a huge priority to recreate a Unix shell in Octave, so if
calling mkoctfile.m involves using an intermediate variable, I don't
see a problem. You don't even need the intermediate variable. For
example, you could do

    mkoctfile("foo.cc", mkoctfile("-p","BLAS_LIBS"))

which is roughly equivalent to its corresponding Unix shell call
above.

The only bug remaining is figuring out what linking flags you need on
McIntosh OS 10, and why mkoctfile -p LAPACK_LIBS isn't producing those
flags.

- Jordi G. H.