Re: trouble compiling

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 05/18/2012 07:20 AM, Doug Stewart wrote:
> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Luca Citi <address@hidden
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Doug!
>     Same here. I am using Kubuntu 12.04 amd64.
>     I had the same error trying to build the development version of octave
>     after installing the default ubuntu build-deps for octave3.2 that for
>     some reason misses bison. I fixed it by installing bison too.
>
>     This is what I suggest:
>     $ sudo aptitude --add-user-tag octave-build build-dep octave3.2
>     $ sudo aptitude --add-user-tag octave-build install bison
>     then, if you have already messed up your clone of the octave repository:
>     $ make clean
>     $ hg st -un0 | xargs -0 rm
>     Finally:
>     $ ./autogen.sh
>     $ ./configure
>     $ make
>
>     I hope this helps.
>     Luca
>
>
>
> Yes this did help!!!!
>
> I am still testing ---- but I thing the problem is with make.
>
> I was using make -j6  with my 4 core computer -- and it failed.
> But when I used just make  it passed
>
> I am trying different combinations to see what it is.

That worked for me as well.  Thanks Luca.  Cleaning everything out must 
have been the answer.

...

So, there are a couple things about the build process that aren't so 
nice.  They are:

1) Mild warnings in the configure file (i.e., warnings that don't appear 
at the very end, but instead are only amongst a whole lot of output) 
that really end up being needed in the default compilation.  Here's an 
example:

configure:59086: WARNING: I didn't find flex, but it's only a problem if 
you need to reconstruct lex.cc

Apparently I need to reconstruct lex.cc, so why wasn't this flagged as 
an error?  Any reason?  Or just an oversight in a rather big config 
process?  This is true of the following utilities:

WARNING: 'flex' is missing on your system.
WARNING: 'gperf' is needed, and is missing on your system.
cascade of errors that seemed to be fixed after installing bison (but 
I'm not 100% sure)
WARNING: 'texi2dvi' is needed, and is missing on your system.

Yes, I could have searched the config.log file for all warnings and 
gotten rid of them before going on to compile, but hindsight is 20/20. 
Furthermore, some of the warnings inside config.log are somewhat 
innocuous, like "old type cast" and the sort.

2) After encountered problems in the compilation, just running 
./configure isn't enough.  Is it a reasonable assumption that the user 
should know this?  In my case, I tried ./configure, then figured I'd go 
back another step and do ./autogen.sh first.  Neither of those worked. 
It didn't cross my mind that

$ make clean
$ hg st -un0 | xargs -0 rm

would help.


Given that, one way to fix this would be to make flex, gperf, bison and 
texi2dvi required programs and error instead of warn in the ./configure 
step.  (OR, leave them as is and make the warning more apparent and more 
compelling.  The "but it's only a problem" makes it sound like these 
tools are something that can be disregarded.)  That would save the most 
time.  Adding the lines above to ./configure that cleans out the 
subdirectories would also help.

Thoughts on what to do?

Dan