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

[Ludovic Courtès]

John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:

> 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.

I think it would.  If there’s a line like:

  execlp ("makeinfo" ...);

patching that to, say:

  execl ("/.../bin/makeinfo" ...);

will definitely work.  (This is what Octave’s build system should be
doing, actually.)

WDYT?

(As an example, see how mingetty is patched to refer to a specific
‘login’ program, in admin.scm.)

Ludo’.