Building/installing Octave as a non-administrator on a sudo system

[Daniel J Sebald]

I'm curious how many developers have attempted building and install 
Octave as a non-administrator on a system with sudo.  A 
non-administrator is someone who does not have privilege to run "sudo". 
 I might guess it is few, as most people on this list are the admin 
type who automatically opt for sys-admin status given the chance.

Given trends, I've now had the experience of working on a sudo-linux 
system.  I created my account to be non-administrator, thinking there 
was always the default "user" account as a fallback.  It wasn't 
enjoyable building and installing Octave this way.

Things seemed to build fine.  And I could run.  Installing packages 
didn't go well, however.  The complaint from "pkg" command was that 
there is no "mkoctfile".  Eventually I figured out that one simply had 
to make and install octave as an administrator, then "mkoctfile" was 
available.  But of course, being a non-administrator meant I couldn't 
run sudo.  Nor could I log in to the "user" account and run sudo.  I had 
to exit the Desktop and log in to the "user" account.  Going back to my 
non-admin account and now running under a non-local Octave, mkoctfile 
was visible, but the package files existing as *.oct object files 
weren't visible until I added to the search path the directories where 
the .oct files existed.

I suppose that the pool of un-experienced, non-admin users who will 
attempt an Octave build is small, but before the next release we should 
probably put some thought into how Octave now works for the non-admin 
sort, e.g., do packages install without problems when an account is 
non-admin.

Dan