Re: Flatpak prevents mex linking to any system libraries

[Mike Miller]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 17:00:28 +0100, Richard Crozier wrote:
> Just a note to say that I've done some testing, and, as is obviously the
> case, installing Octave 4.4 via Flatpak prevents making any mex/oct files
> which link to system libraries. This is a pretty severe restriction for me
> (or rather my users). Is there any workaround for this? Won't this affect
> many forge packages too?

For your definition of "system libraries", which I'm assuming is not the
same as my definition. I will continue assuming you mean "a particular
mathematical or scientific library which is not part of a standard
operating system installation."

This is more of a Flatpak question than an Octave question.

The question could be worded as, how does Flatpak plan to accomodate
applications that allow dynamic loading of plugins or extensions that
may depend upon other libraries that are not part of the Flatpak
runtime?

I am not a Flatpak maintainer so I can only guess, but my guess would be
that they will expect the extension to download or bundle everything
with it. This is similar to the typical Python pip module distribution
model, where e.g. NumPy bundles copies of FFTPACK and LAPACK, and PyQt5
bundles a copy of the entire Qt 5 runtime.

> The only alternative (since the ppa is no longer to be updated)

That is not true, the PPA will be updated when Octave 4.4 is in Ubuntu.
But I do hope that most users will find the Flatpak app to be a viable
solution for their use case, when they care more about using Octave and
less about integration with the operating system.

> is to
> install Octave from source which is daunting for typical users.

That's not the only alternative. You can install or copy the libraries
needed into a user's home directory, or you can bundle the libraries
with the mex or oct code.

If it is a typical numeric library, it should be easier to build and
install that in a user's home directory than to build and install Octave
from source.

Or you can try building your own Octave package for Ubuntu using the
Debian source package, to try to get ahead of the Ubuntu maintainers.

-- 
mike

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