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Re: what to do about dependencies?
From: |
Alexander Hansen |
Subject: |
Re: what to do about dependencies? |
Date: |
Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:09:21 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 |
On 1/6/12 11:36 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> People often complain that building Octave is too complicated. The
> problem is usually that it is too hard to get dependencies installed,
> and we don't even have a complete statement of what dependencies are
> needed or where to get them. One only finds out by running configure.
>
> I've tried to help improve that situation slightly with the following
> patch to document the dependencies and where to find their sources:
>
> http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/87f06b9990bb
>
> I'm not pretending that this is perfect or complete, but it is a
> start.
>
> For the future, I think we should consider including at least the
> required dependencies (GNU Readline, PCRE, BLAS+LAPACK (ATLAS?)) and
> all numerical library dependencies (ARPACK, FFTW3, GLPK, Qhull,
> QRUPDATE, and SuiteSparse) with Octave. Then we could arrange for the
> configure script to automatically fall back to the included packages
> if these libraries are not already installed, or if there is some
> problem with them that would prevent them from being used. There
> could also be a summary message from configure explaining that this is
> happening so that the user would have a chance to fix the system
> problems and run configure again instead of just using the included
> software.
>
> I'm not sure whether we should consider including other libraries as
> well. The cURL, HDF5, and zlib libraries might be fairly easy, but
> something like GraphicsMagick++ itself requires several more libraries
> and I don't think we want to attempt including everything down to the
> level of the C library (!). But the list above would go a long way to
> avoiding the complaints we see about how hard it is to build Octave
> and dependencies. At least running configure and make would work and
> build a copy of Octave that would run, though perhaps without graphics
> capabilities.
>
> We could also have configure options to force the included libraries
> to be used instead of the system libraries. That way we would be able
> to point to a set of package versions that are known to work.
>
> I'm not proposing that we do this for the 3.6.0 release, but that we
> consider it for 3.8.0.
>
> Comments?
>
> jwe
That sounds OK as long as the bundled packages are just fallbacks. As a
downstream packager, I'd definitely prefer to use packages from my
distribution when possible.
- what to do about dependencies?, John W. Eaton, 2012/01/06
- Re: what to do about dependencies?,
Alexander Hansen <=
- Re: what to do about dependencies?, Michael D Godfrey, 2012/01/06
- Re: what to do about dependencies?, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso, 2012/01/06
- Re: what to do about dependencies?, Dr. Alexander Klein, 2012/01/06
- Re: what to do about dependencies?, Søren Hauberg, 2012/01/06
- Re: what to do about dependencies?, Olaf Till, 2012/01/06
- Re: what to do about dependencies?, Thomas Weber, 2012/01/06