Re: what to do about dependencies?

[Tatsuro MATSUOKA]

Hello

For window (MinGW) build, it is not realistic to distribute of source of 
dependency.
I have distributed  dependency libraries and toolkits for there several month.

The distribution made increase in number of people who build octave on the 
MinGW platform.  

For windows case, it is realistic to point to the my web site of dependency 
distribution rather than distribute source tar ball of dependencies.

Regards

Tatsuro 

--- On Sat, 2012/1/7, 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
>