Re: [PATCH 3/3] gnu: Add octave and dependencies

[John Darrington]

On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 05:42:17PM +0100, Andreas Enge wrote:
     On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 05:14:57PM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
     > The octave build system is rather naive.  These propagated inputs don't 
actually
     > *need* to be present at configure/build time.  But the ./configure 
(rather stupidly IMO)
     > checks for their presence, and turns off the relevant features if they 
are not found.
     > Therefore, one must declare them as native-inputs just to keep 
./configure happy AND
     > as propagated inputs because they are called in a pipe from the octave 
program itself.
     
     Would it be reasonable to patch the lines in which external programs are
     called, replacing the program name by its complete path with a well-chosen
     (substitute*)?
     Then one would not need to propagate the inputs.
     
I don't think that will work.  One needs to propagate the inputs.  Otherwise 
octave won't
work (properly).  For example, one needs to ensure that when octave is 
installed, less is
also installed.  Otherwise it wont have a pager.  Similarly for texinfo - if 
makeinfo does
not get installed along with octave, then the integrated documentation won't be 
available.

A better approach would be to patch the configure so that it does not bother to 
check for
these programs AND then to patch the install phase to check for them.  But I 
don't fancy
doing that.

J'


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