Re: binary RPMs of Octave stable for enterprise Linux systems

[Thomas Yengst]

On Jul 29, 2012, at 5:16 PM, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 06:13:19PM -0400, Michael D Godfrey wrote:
>> On 07/29/2012 04:53 PM, Thomas Yengst wrote:
>>> I have built Octave 3.6.2 RPMs for CentOS-5 and Scientific Linux 6
>>> and am happy to build for other flavors of Linux if there is interest
>>> and a place to store them.
>> I have been building current versions for Fedora RHEL 5 systems
>> because there are people who depend on me to do it.  The last system I
>> built there is 3.6.2.  I could summarize what was needed to get that
>> working. But, also, I suspect that I will need to do it again for the
>> next release. LLVM may, for example, be a problem.  There is no llvm
>> at all in the RHEL 5 repositories.
>> 
>> I know that RHEL 5 is ancient history, but there are quite a few sites
>> that are essentially locked into it.  Some, but not necessarily all,
>> of their software suppliers support newer RHEL systems, and RedHat
>> says that the only "safe" way to move from 5 to newer versions is to
>> do fresh installs.  Upgrading is not an option.  This is close to
>> impossible at sites where there are many RHEL 5 systems.  The idea of
>> doing them all at once with some fallback in case it goes wrong is
>> practically impossible since it also means switching versions of all
>> the tools that are in use.  It does not appear that the RedHat folks
>> have thought this through.  Therefore, there will be sites sitting at
>> RHEL 5 at most for the foreseeable future.
> 
> Same here, I have an interest in keeping RHEL 5 compatibility for
> certain systems I am working with. I've had success building and running
> it myself. I agree LLVM will be a problem, but as long as it can be
> optionally disabled we still have an Octave that will build and run
> functionally equivalent.
> 
> I have on my list to work through some libcurl incompatibilities I've
> run into that will allow the urlwrite functions and ftp class to work on
> RHEL 5.
> 
> -- 
> mike

Agree wholeheartedly. You have the same issue that I do. Large hardware 
expenditures that cannot be upgraded but still want to take advantage of recent 
stable releases of Octave. As for RHEL 5, I have discovered the libcurl 
incompatibility as well. I simply compiled Octave without the ftp functionality 
because it didn't matter to me. Arguably, patching the Octave source code to 
take new or old argument types for urlread and urlwrite is the correct way to 
solve the problem.

The LLVM problem may be worth tackling - the just in time compiler that Max is 
working on is fantastic. I will begin looking into it on CentOS5.

I've attached the RPM patches and SPEC file that I use to compile for CentOS5. 
The patches are stolen from Fedora and the spec file has been nurtured of 
documentation and libcurl. I would gladly accept a better spec file - I'm a 
noob at rpmbuild.

Where can we deposit binary RPMs with sufficient documentation that people can 
easily decide whether they want to download and install the binary version? 
Perhaps a question best answered by Jordi or JWE. Can we put them in 
subdirectories at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave?

I would like to change the language of 
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html to provide links to Linux 
binaries rather than say "Octave has no control over binary releases.". I'm 
happy to maintain the stable RPMs for CentOS5 and Scientific Linux 6

thanks much,
Tom

octave-CentOS5-rpmbuild.zip
Description: Zip archive