Re: why is the wiki page on building octave so lacking?

[Richard Crozier]

On 19/03/2012 16:28, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

> 
> [I felt that parts of the text might scare off those interested so made
> small modifications.]
> 
> "The Octave build and install process is most mature on Unix-like
> systems, e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, etc. and is described in the sections
> below. To build on other operating systems requires more knowledge
> specific to that system.  Further information on alternate platforms is
> available online, such as on the Octave wiki
> (http://www.octave.org/wiki/index.php?title=GNU_Octave_Wiki), but note
> that this wiki is not directly controlled by the Octave authors.
> 
> Octave depends on many other packages and libraries. The first section
> below describes how to obtain and install these dependencies before
> attempting to build Octave.  Furthermore, the build utilities on Unix
> systems will identify any missing or out-of-date libraries before
> proceeding to compile and assemble Octave.


Sounds fine to me.


> 
> [I'm not exactly following the next paragraph.  I tried improving the
> "Octave itself" ambiguity, but don't believe I have.  Were you intending
> to make a distinction between "configure" and "make"?]
> 
> The second section describes the process of compiling and assembling
> Octave. On a Unix-like operating system this can often be as simple as
> running a few commands from the terminal. The Octave build system is
> based on GNU make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/). This is a
> commonly used system for compiling large and complex programs. It is
> often supplied as a standard package on Unix-based operating systems, so
> you are likely to already have it installed. Before running make to
> build Octave you must also first configure the build process on your
> system by running a shell script supplied with the source code. This
> configuration stage is also described in the second section.
> 

Yes, well, I was trying to introduce the concepts of configure and make,
without going into detail. The next page sort of launches straight into
"Run configure.sh ... " without any gentle introduction to the steps.

You're right though, it is a bit clunky here.


Richard

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