Re: what to do about dependencies?

[Søren Hauberg]

fre, 06 01 2012 kl. 11:36 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
> 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.

Some time ago, Jaroslav suggested having ./configure suggesting to
download dependencies that were not found. I don't know how much work it
is to implement such a system, but it seems nicer than having a large
tarball with everything including the kitchen sink included.

That being said, I see that including stuff in the tarball would help a
bunch of people, so why not...?

Søren