According to Julius Smith <address@hidden> (on 06/24/04):
> It is interesting that both of the current make failures in octave-forge
> under Red Hat 9 were due to the Communications Toolbox. The maintainers of
> this toolbox apparently do not bother to try compiling their project before
> submitting it to octave-forge. I find it hard to believe these are
> platform-specific bugs.
If the maintainters were indeed that delinquent, we'd have no choice
but to send them to bed without supper. I doubt, however, that it is
the case here: you seem to assume that your locally installed toolchain
is working fine, but at the same time you have reported mysterious and
sometimes irreproducible compilation errors (in GCC and TeX).
For the sake of the young readers here, please indulge this little
pontification. I found it works well for me to err on the side of
giving the benefit of the doubt to others when passing out the
blame. Most of the time, even if it seems to me that I am right and
others are wrong, I try to tone down what I am saying: many a time I
managed not to come out as an idiot by forcing myself to hedge my
statements. The difference between saying "maintainers [..] apparently
do not bother to try" and "I wonder why it didn't work for me" might
count if our assumptions turn out to be wrong.
In this case, I'd run some hardware tests, and check and report the
versions of programs in my toolchain.
p