Re: Fatal make error

[John Eaton]

address@hidden (R. Chip Hinde) wrote:

: I just spent a day ftp'ing, building, and installing the folloing on a Sun
: Sparc Station 2 running SunOS 4.1.3_U1:
: 
: bison-1.22/     flex-2.4.7/     gcc-2.6.0/      libg++-2.6/     make-3.71/
: 
: I followed the very basic installation procedures without any special
: swithces (Let me warn you, I'm a unix and Sun novice).  When installing the
: gcc-2.6, I created the stage2 and stage3 compilers, compared them and found
: no difference.  According to the gnu installation documentation, I took
: this to mean that there was no error in the gcc instalation.

It's not a guarantee, but it is a good sign if the compiler built from
gcc can compile itself and produce the same code as the compiler built
from the native cc.

: When I unzipped and untarred octave-1.0, configure seemed to find
: everything it was looking for.  However, when I ran make, I got this
: message:
: 
: make: Fatal error in reader: Makeconf, line 48: Unexpected end of line seen
:
: I looked at the line, but not being familiar with the language octave is
: written in, I could not make heads nor tails of the error message.

This is an error from Sun's make.  You need to use GNU make to build
Octave.

Even if you fix this problem, you will not be able to build Octave 1.0
using gcc 2.6.0, because of bugs in Octave that are now detected by
the newer compiler that did not show up with previous versions.

All of these problems have been fixed in my development sources, so
Octave 1.1 will work with gcc 2.6.x.  Unfortunately, there have been
too many changes to make it possible for me to easily generate a set
of patches to make it possible to compile 1.0 with gcc 2.6.0.

If you want to build Octave 1.0, I would recommend getting gcc-2.5.8
and libg++-2.5.3.

If you just want to try it out, but are not all that interested in
spending a lot of time compiling it, you can get SPARCstation binaries
from ftp.che.utexas.edu in the directory /pub/octave/BINARIES.

I don't know when 1.1 will be ready for a release, but I am working on
it and making a fair amount of progress.  Here are some things to look
forward to, taken from the current version of the NEWS file:

  * The `&&' and `||' logical operators are now evaluated in a
    short-circuit fashion and work differently than the element by
    element operators `&' and `|'.  See the Octave manual for more
    details.

  * Expressions like 1./m are now parsed as 1 ./ m, not 1. / m.

  * The replot command now takes the same arguments as gplot or
    gsplot (except ranges, which cannot be respecified with replot
    (yet)) so you can add additional lines to existing plots. 

  * The hold command has been implemented.

  * Improved load and save commands:

    -- The save and load commands can now read and write a new binary
       file format.  Conversion to and from IEEE big and little endian
       formats is handled automatically.  Conversion for other formats
       has not yet been implemented.

    -- The load command can now read Matlab .mat files, though it is
       not yet able to read sparse matrices or handle conversion for
       all data formats.

    -- The load command automatically determines the save format
       (binary, ascii, or Matlab binary).

    -- The default format for the save command is taken from the
       builtin variable `default_save_format'.

    -- The save and load commands now both accept a list of globbing
       patterns so you can easily load a list of variables from a
       file.

    -- The load command now accepts the option -list, for listing the
       variable names without actually loading the data.  With
       -verbose, it prints a long listing.

  * New functions:

      feof   -- check EOF condition for a specified file
      ferror -- check error state for a specified file
      fread  -- read binary data from a file
      fwrite -- write binary data to a file

      kbhit  -- get a single character from the terminal

      axis   -- change plot ranges

      diary  -- save commands and output to a file

      type   -- show the definition of a function or variable
      which  -- print the type of an identifier or the location of a
                function file

      null   -- XXX FIXME XXX -- need short descriptions for these
      orth

      compan
      conv
      deconv
      roots
      poly
      polyderiv
      polyinteg
      polyreduce
      polyval
      polyvalm
      residue

      fft2
      ifft2
      filter
      sinc
      freqz
      
      complement
      intersection
      create_set
      union

  * New image processing functions.

  * If given a second argument, svd() now returns an economy-sized
    decomposition, eliminating the unecessary rows or columns of U or
    V.

  * The find function now handles 2 and 3 output arguments.

  * The qr function now allows computation of QR with pivoting.

  * The output from the history command now goes through the pager.

  * If a function is called without assigning the result, nargout is
    now correctly set to 0.

  * It is now possible to write functions that only set some return
    values.  For example, calling the function

      function [x, y, z] = f () x = 1; z = 2; endfunction

    as

      [a, b, c] = f ()

    produces:

      a = 1

      b = [](0x0)

      c = 2

  * Text-style functions (ls, type, etc.) can now also be called as
    normal functions.  For example,

      ls -l

    and

      ls ("-l")

    are now equivalent.

  * New builtin variable `commas_in_literal_matrix' to allow some
    control over how Octave decides to convert spaces to commas in
    matrix expressions like `[m (1)]'.

    If the value is "required", Octave will never insert a comma in a
    literal matrix list.  For example, the statement [1 2] will result
    in an error instead of being treated the same as [1, 2].

    If the value is "traditional", Octave will convert spaces to a
    comma between identifiers and `('.  For example, given m = [3 2],

    the statement

      [m (1)]

    will be parsed as

      [m, (1)]

    and will result in

      [3 2 1]

    This is apparently how Matlab behaves.

    Any other value for commas_in_literal_matrix results in behavior
    that is the same as traditional, except that Octave does not
    convert spaces to a comma between identifiers and `('.  For
    example, the statement 

      [m (1)]

    will produce `3'.  This is the way Octave has always behaved.

  * Lots of bug fixes.


If you made it this far and are interested in helping to test new
prerelease versions of Octave, please send me a note.

Thanks,

jwe