Re: Build a portable linux binary?

[Tatsuro MATSUOKA]

----- Original Message -----
> From: roland65 
> To: octave-maintainers
> Cc: 
> Date: 2019/2/22, Fri 17:10
> Subject: Re: Build a portable linux binary?
> 
> Mike Miller-4 wrote
>>  If you or someone else is interested in doing the work, it can certainly
>>  be done. I don't think the Octave maintainers are interested in doing
>>  the work when there are already plenty of ways to easily install Octave
>>  on GNU/Linux systems.
> 
> Yes of course, there are different ways and using the package manager of the
> Linux distribution is the most common of these.
> 
> However this method has drawbacks. For example, I use Ubuntu 18.04 (long
> term stable version) and Octave version is only 4.2.2. So, to get the last
> Octave 4.4.1 and apply some recent patches I need, I had to compile Octave
> and a lot of its packages and build deb packages for Ubuntu 18.04. This was
> a lot of work, but it finally worked...

On Ubuntu, I think that it is not so hard task to build from source.

Almost build dependency can be installed with instruction (Of course, I 
installed Qt tools ) 
I first do
sudo apt build-dep gnuplot
This installs a lot of tools what are required to build many tools. 

and then I follow the instruction:
https://www.scivision.co/compiling-octave-4-on-ubuntu/ 

I add portaudio19-dev, libfltk1.3-dev, libopenblas-dev in addition to them.
and
./configure --with-blas='-lopenblas'

This is my routine for install octave from source on Ubuntu. 

> Now, some colleagues and friends who use another Linux distro, wanted to use
> my work and they simply couldn't. They have to do the same work of building
> these many Octave packages for their particular distribution. Most of them
> found it was too complicated and they gave up...
> 
> So, I think it would make sense to have a way to distribute a portable
> binary package that could be run on many Linux distributions...
Flatpak is a solution but as you mention it has problem.

For me I could not install flatpak on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
This is important for me, so that I prefer to install from source rather than 
use flatpak.
 

Tatsuro