Re: FC recommendation in README.MacOS

[Rik]

On 11/28/2014 05:01 AM, Ben Abbott wrote:
>> On Nov 27, 2014, at 11:51 PM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> 11/27/14
>>
>> Has anyone followed the instructions for building Octave in the
>> README.MacOS and does the line defining the Fortran compiler FC make any
>> difference?
>>
>> ##### Cut #####
>> 2.2.2 Building Octave as a 32-bit Application
>> --------------------------------------------
>>
>> The commands below are sufficient to build a 32-bit Octave.
>>
>>  export FC="/usr/bin/gfortran"
>>  export CFLAGS="-m32"
>>  export FFLAGS="$CFLAGS -ff2c"
>>  export CPPFLAGS="$CFLAGS -D_REENTRANT -D__LISTS__"
>>  export LDFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
>>  ./configure --disable-readline --disable-docs
>>  make
>> ##### End Cut #####
>>
>> On the Linux side, the Fortran compiler used is set by the F77 environment
>> variable, not the FC variable.  I rather suspect that it is the same on a
>> Mac and that the line should be "export F77=...".  Again on Linux, if FC is
>> used for the compiler then the flags variable is FCFLAGS, not FFLAGS.  So
>> there is a second mismatch.
>>
>> I'm working at removing cruft and this is one of the few places in the
>> Octave sources that mentions the FC variable.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Rik
> To be honest, that approach never worked for me, and is now sufficiently 
> dated that I'm confident it can't work on Yosemite. That approach assumed 
> AT&T Research's patched gfortran for Apple's gcc.
>
>       http://r.research.att.com/tools/
>
> Apple has now moved on to clang and it appears AT&T stopped its support for 
> patching gfortran with Lion.
>
> I recommend deleting that part of the README.MacOS.  Actually, most of what 
> is in that file is dated and likely wrong. It really needs a rewrite. Or to 
> make it simple, maybe just a like to the wki?

Thanks Ben.  This is enough for me to continue with my work.  I'm not
competent enough to re-write this as I've never worked on a Mac platform. 
It also seems from the message traffic just now that there is some debate
over the best way to get Octave to work on Mac.

--Rik