Re: what to do about dependencies?

[Thomas Weber]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 11:36:20AM -0500, 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.
> 
> For the future, I think we should consider including at least the
> required dependencies (GNU Readline, PCRE, BLAS+LAPACK (ATLAS?)) and
> all numerical library dependencies (ARPACK, FFTW3, GLPK, Qhull,
> QRUPDATE, and SuiteSparse) with Octave.  

How long would building such a tarball take? And if there's a bug with
one of those bundled libraries, who will be responsible for taking care
of it?

        Thomas