Re: octave install

[Mike Miller]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 21:13:14 +0800, lukshuntim wrote:
> So it appears that after all, as far as deb packages are concerned, octave
> and other mpi-enabled packages still cannot co-exist peacefully if they
> depend on hdf5. :-(

It does bring some inconveniences, but it should be possible to build
and use Octave with any of the hdf5 library alternatives (non-MPI,
openmpi, or mpich2). I'm currently building Octave with
libhdf5-openmpi-dev installed, but I build it in such a way that it
doesn't matter which of the libhdf5*-dev packages I have installed.

First of all, the easiest way to go would be to install packages from
the official Debian / Ubuntu repositories. If you are stuck on 12.04
LTS for some reason, the next best would be to install the
semi-official packages from our PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~octave/+archive/stable. I just updated the PPA
to 3.8.1 this weekend. All of these packages should be installable
alongside any libhdf5 variant.

To build Octave yourself against any hdf5 library, here is what I pass
to configure (among other options):

  ../configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/mpi -DMPICH_SKIP_MPICXX
-DOMPI_SKIP_MPICXX" ...

This should build with any of the 3 libhdf5*-dev packages installed,
and you should even be able to switch between them without any effect
on how Octave is built or linked, or how subsequent oct-files or
packages are built. This works for me at least on Debian testing.

HTH,

-- 
mike