Re: Configure error for Octave 3.4.2 on CentOS 5.6: "A BLAS library was detected but found incompatible with your Fortran 77 compiler settings"

[Frank Thommen]

> when running `configure` for Octave 3.4.2 on a CentOS 5.6 machine, It 
> ends with "configure: error: A BLAS library was detected but found 
> incompatible with your Fortran 77 compiler settings.".  The last lines 
> of the `configure` output are:
>
> [...]

I found the solution by trying to compile older versions of octave, 
where the error messages are much more informative.  E.g. when 
`configure`-in octave 3.2.4:

[...]
configure: WARNING: A BLAS library was detected but found incompatible 
with your Fortran 77 compiler.  The reference BLAS implementation will 
be used. To improve performance, consider using a different Fortran 
compiler or a switch like -ff2c to make your Fortran compiler use a 
calling convention compatible with the way your BLAS library was 
compiled, or use a different BLAS library.
[...]

Using `setenv FFLAGS '-ff2c'; ./configure` solved the issue with octave 
3.4.2.

Developers: Could you please print out these much more informative error 
messages again?

Cheers

   frank