Re: what to do about dependencies?

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 01/06/2012 08:36 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

People often complain that building Octave is too complicated.  The
problem is usually that it is too hard to get dependencies installed,
and we don't even have a complete statement of what dependencies are
needed or where to get them.  One only finds out by running configure.

I've tried to help improve that situation slightly with the following
patch to document the dependencies and where to find their sources:

  http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/87f06b9990bb

I'm not pretending that this is perfect or complete, but it is a
start.

John,

Great!  This is definitely a start on resolving a long-standing problem.
One point that I noticed is that in the list of dependencies you usually
provide the URL for the source.  At least for Fedora systems many of these
are packages are available from the Fedora repositories.  For now
at least it would be helpful to just mention this, possibly mentioning
that commands like "yum list all *package-name*"  would show if the
dependency can be installed using yum.  The last time I did a new install
of Fedora, I think that all the dependencies, including suitesparse, were
available from standard repositories.  This is much simpler and quicker then
downloading source.

Now, just a question: the usual (for me) flow has been:
hg "source" into a subdir "octave" using: hg clone http://www.octave.org/hg/octave
cd octave
./.autogen.sh ; ./configure ; make

You say that you can run ./autogen.sh before cd octave, and then cd octave run ./configure...
so ./autogen is run at a level one up from ./configure. Is this what you meant?

Anyhow, the patch as it is is a major help.

Michael