Re: the nvidia/osmesa dilema

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 10:43:34 -0500, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> On 05/04/2016 05:36 AM, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
> > hi all,
> > 
> > We still have this issue with building the documentation and running
> > tests (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?44478) that casues segfaults
> > when the user is running with nvidia drivers.
> > 
> > The documentation issue, I assume, comes form the attempt of printing
> > images to files without rendering on the screen. Would it be possible
> > to give a flag on the make file to disable off-screen printing? Of
> > course, if possible i would try to do it and submit the patch.
> 
> How about rather than just disable off-screen printing with a flag, make it
> a reconfigurability flag, e.g., --with-gnuplot-offscreen.  Or something that
> will make Octave use a different graphics toolkit.  I tried a couple nights
> ago to place an .octaverc file that changes the graphics toolkit in the
> various build directories where octave-run is launched...didn't work.

If you take a look at the functions that print the figures for the
manual, there is already code in there to handle the case when Octave is
built without OSMesa support.

If you have the proprietary nvidia drivers and you know that OSMesa
doesn't work, just try building Octave with "--without-OSMesa" and see
what happens.

I think patches would be welcome to make the configure script
automatically disable OSMesa if we can detect this situation somehow.

> That, or fix the issue with nVidia off-screen printing.

True.

-- 
mike