Status of octave on Fedora

[Quentin Spencer]

There has been recent discussion on this list about installing octave 
and related packages on Fedora, so I thought I would post an update. 
Dmitri Sergatskov has been kind enough to make some space available on 
his FTP server for the RPMS I have created:
ftp://coffee.phys.unm.edu/pub/octave
This set includes version 2.1.67 of octave, octave-forge, and some 
additional dependencies to include the extra bells and whistles, as well 
as non-broken versions of blas and lapack (don't use the ones that come 
with Fedora Core 3). Missing are HDF5 and ATLAS. I intend to try 
packaging these eventually. Also not present in these RPMS (but 
required) is qhull, because it is now in Fedora Extras and can be 
obtained at
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/3/i386/qhull-2003.1-2.i386.rpm

These were built on Fedora Core 3, but I have heard that Fedora Core 3 
and 2 are binary compatible, so they may work on release 2 as well. For 
older versions such as FC1 or Red Hat 9, I would suggest downloading the 
SRPMS and building with the command:
rpmbuild --rebuild <SRPM file>

As for the future of octave on Fedora, it appears that I have finally 
cleared the beaurocratic obstacles to becoming the official Fedora 
Extras maintainer of octave and related packages. Octave, blas and 
lapack were removed from the first test release of Fedora Core 4, and I 
think it will stay that way. The updating programs (yum, up2date) will 
be enabled by default to install from Fedora Extras in Fedora Core 4, so 
by the time the final version is released, it should be possible to 
install everything with one command (yum install octave-forge), similar 
to Debian. Some packages from Fedora Extras are still being maintained 
in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but I don't know whether that will include 
octave.

I have been building these packages for my own use for a long time, so 
this project should be manageable, but if anyone is interested in 
helping (especially with figuring out how to package ATLAS), please let 
me know.

regards,
Quentin



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