gcc | Octave 2.1.4x | saga continues

[Evan Cooch]

To re-cap, I've been using 2.1.39 successfully on my RH 7.3 system, which 
has the 2.9.6 gcc compiler bundled. Several people have told me the this 
version of gcc is 'buggy' (confirming suspicions I've had). But, buggy or 
not, Octave 2.1.39 compiles and runs just fine with it.

However, starting with Octave 2.1.40, this version of gcc no longer 
successfully compiles Octave. The solution (as several folks have 
suggested) is to upgrade to a more recent flavour of gcc. I did so, to 
3.2.2. While the Octave make for 2.1.4x seems to get further along than it 
did with gcc 2.9.6, it still crashes and burns. Turns out that the make is 
looking for several things which are not located under RH where they might 
be under other version of GNU/Linux (specifically, Debian, which seems 
to  be the reference standard).

After about 2 hours of fiddling (adding this library, or that package), I 
decided to give up, and stick with 2.1.39. With RH, once you start mucking 
around with compilers, you can screw up a LOT of things (I made this 
mistake 2 months ago trying to upgrade python - had to do a complete 
re-install to recover). This is not to denigrate RH - I've found the single 
biggest pain with GNU/Linux systems in general is in handling package 
upgrades, and dependency resolution. Each of the 'big' releases of 
GNU/Linux (RH, SUSE, Debian) has their own approach to handling this, but 
none of them are as good as they could/should be. As such, upgrading 
software with multiple dependencies can be a real challenge, and is 
probably the single biggest reason for people 'purchasing' upgrades from RH 
(or SUSE) - the upgrades deal with all these hassles for you.

At some point, I'll try again, but in the interim, if anyone manages to 
build Octave 2.1.4x on a RH 7.xx system, please drop me a line. 



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