Re: Install status on Mac OS X 10.6.2

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 01/11/2010 10:45 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:

On 11-Jan-2010, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

| It may be that providing 
| a binary is the best
| choice in any case.  Most Mac users do not expect to have to compile 
| from source.

Who will build and distribute the binary?

In any case, I think we should still try to make it as straightforward
as possible to build Octave.  One problem is the number of
dependencies.  Most GNU/Linux systems have adequate package managers
that make installing all the build dependencies fairly simple.

OS X systems have fink, macports, and what else?  But in my limited
experience, none were really good.  For example, I've tried using fink
in the past, but to get any remotely recent versions of the various
dependencies, you have to build nearly the entire fink system from
sources.  Compared to what is available on most GNU/Linux systems,
that's not a very friendly package management system.

The situation seems even worse on Windows systems without Cygwin, as
there doesn't appear to be anything that even approaches the fink
package system and everything is just "go to this list of random web
sites and download these things and try to build them and oh by the
way good luck".

jwe
  

I agree that a "standard" way of building Octave on Macs would be
good.  I also agree that neither Fink nor MacPorts are suitable as a
base: they introduce more non-standard usages and, in my experience,
more problems.  It would be wonderful if Apple could adopt the Fedora
methodology with respect to free (and even non_GPL) software, but
this is very unlikely in the foreseeable future.

>From my experience, the place to start is gnu.org.  They provide current
"official" versions of all GNU packages.  These all, by default, install into
/usr/local.  This deals with almost everything up to the "special" packages,
like suitesparse, etc.  The main missing package is gfortran.  The Mac-compatible
gfortran 4.2.1 works with -O0. I think that the GNU packages, installed by just
download, make, make install, get to a system that will complete the
./autogen.sh; ./compile sequence.  (With /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin in
the PATH) This may even run make -i check with only the usual errors.
My current build environment is based on this approach and it runs quite
reasonably, including fltk as the backend.  However, my first attempt to
compile suitesparse just failed miserably.

One problem with getting this completed successfully is that it really needs
a Mac 10.6 system dedicated to the task, i.e. it must be feasible to reset it
to the plain system as delivered by Apple, and then apply the packages from
that base.  My system is far from that.  It even has a few links stuck in to get
around problems, as well as lots of stuff in /usr/local.  Since it is the only Mac
I have, I cannot break it for testing.

Finally, I think it may make sense to only target OS X 10.6.2 with Xcode and
above.  There are far too many variables already.

Fortunately,  our lab at Stanford is essentially a Windows-free
zone.  In any case, I know practically nothing about Windows.

Michael