Re: Octave build dependencies wiki

[Reza Housseini]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Mike Miller <address@hidden> wrote:

On Thu, 19 Dec 2013 10:30:08 +0100, Reza Housseini wrote:
> So I suggest we provide a tarball list, a diff to the mercurial list and
> eventually a diff to the full dependencies?

I think this is a good way to split up this information. You might want
to have two major sections with two separate tables. First on the page
and higher priority is the one for end users who want to build a stable
released tarball. Of secondary importance is a table for developers who
want to build from mercurial, and this would only need to list the
additional dependencies.

I'm also a bit confused about the critical/recommended/optional status
on the page. It would be good to clarify what is meant by those levels
so readers know what to do with the information, it's not clear to me.
For example why is curl marked critical but readline optional? What does
that mean to someone building Octave for the first time?

For as many dependencies as Octave has, many of which serve a different
domain-specific function, it might be good to put a hint in there for
each library, beyond the description of the library itself. Otherwise
you might as well just say “Here is the full set of libraries you need
to build Octave”.

For example, it might make sense to group together FLTK, GL2PS, and
OpenGL because together they provide native plotting support. If you
don't want or can't install FLTK for some reason, then there's no need
for GL2PS or OpenGL.

We might list general functionality or even specific Octave functions
that require certain libraries like arpack, glpk, and suitesparse.

Thanks Reza, good work on this so far.

--
mike

Yes that was exactly my intention, therefor I provided the column "tools". But I wasn't sure about every usage so Ia asked the community to provide more information.