Octave On MacOSX

[Thomas Treichl]

Dear Joe,

thank you very much for your comments. I'd like to keep this README file 
up-to-date as like my MacOSX. You told me that there is an old Wiki page there, 
so I could also write my compilation experiences to the Wiki. This is more a 
question to the maintainers:
============================
Do they want to add the README file to the source and accept patches to keep it 
alive, or should I modify the Wiki page? Doing the same job twice does not make 
any sense to me.

> My general comment is that Apple changes OS X and Xcode Developer Tools
> frequently, and the instructions that worked today don't necessarily work
> tomorrow. There have been times, especially soon after new OS X major
> releases (10.2.0,10.3.0 and 10.4.0), that building of open source codes was
> impossible. Typically, by about 10.x.6, the kinks are worked out and things
> begin to work again.

Okay, thanks, I'm very new to the MacOSX (just 30days ;o). That's why my Mac is 
so absolutely maiden ;o) No Fink, and no DarwinPorts by now ;o)

> Specific comments on your README:
>
> - I have never found it necessary to upgrade bison, sed or awk. The versions
> in the Xcode Developer Tools work for building octave on my G5 Mac. I hope
> Apple upgrades all their tools for the Tiger release later this year. I did
> have to upgrade automake in order to build the new gnuplot, for example.

;o) The XCode tools are a bit strange ;o) I think that I have (with XCode 2.4.1 
and Tiger 10.4.8) the most newest releases, but I had no chance to compile 
octave with the shipped bison, sed and awk, no problems on your machine. And you 
needed to upgrade automake, that program did a good job on my machine.

> - Yes, readline has been a problem right along, and installing a new
> libreadline.a is essential to a fully working octave.
>
> - I have X11 installed, but with AquaTerm, you may not need it. Maybe it is
> needed for fonts or something?

Okay, thanks again, I'll try this.

> - I hope that the newer versions of sparsesuite have a better installer. In
> building octave-2.9.x, installing the spare matrix libraries has been a real
> trip hazard. I realize that this is outside the scope of octave support, but
> added help on the octave wiki may be in order. The Linux folks seem to count
> on the sparsesuite version released with their OS. To compound the disorder,
> sparsesuite seems to be changing rapidly, also.

The SuiteSparse is (nc.)... I also don't like the way to build this package and 
I think that there will nothing be changing in the next months ;o(

> - I have built octave with gfortran, g95 and g77, and, as far as I know,
> they all currently work. gfortran tends to work or not work depending on the
> current build version; however, gfortran should probably be the preferred
> because it is part of gcc, and allows use of Fortran 95 features. There was
> an extra update called cctools that, at times, has been required for the use
> of Fortran. I hope that's a thing of the past. At least I haven't needed to
> install cctools lately.

Okay, I believe -of course- that other compilers will do a good job. But 
gfortran is the only one I found (very quickly) that was shipped as a binary 
version. And if available, I wanted to use binary versions of the various 
programs until we do have all that is needed to compile the octave program. You 
know about other binary precompiled Fortran compilers for MacOSX (no fink, 
darwinport, pure GNU)?

> - octave-forge is another story. There are dependencies there like
> ImageMagick that require some additional studies and downloads. My major
> comment about any open source code on a Mac is that the biggest part of the
> build is getting the dependencies correctly installed first. That's where
> your README will really help.

In the octave-forge package I was already able to

  make packages

without errors but within a lot of warnings! I think at the octave-forge also 
some building rules have to be changed to make the package completely run with 
MacOSX (or maybe even not, I have to see). This is one of my next workings, 
because I want to test the OdePkg m- and mex-files on Linux and Mac. I'll 
discuss these experiences on the octave-forge maintainer's list.

Thanks a lot,
Thomas