Re: Building Octave without xcode

[Ben Abbott]

On Dec 25, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> Is it impossible to build Octave without Xcode? Ben just pushed a
> patch (11410:2df163be223e) for README.MacOS which suggests installing
> Xcode in order to build Octave. This breaks with the GNU coding
> standards:
> 
>     http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/References.html
> 
> There's nothing wrong with helping people install Octave on Mac OS X,
> but we should be able to recommend a method that doesn't depend on
> installing non-free software beyond the core OS and libraries.
> 
> - Jordi G. H.

Xcode is essentially an IDE which uses a modified version of gcc + other 
open-source tools. As a whole Xcode qualifies as "free beer" , but not all of 
it qualifies as "free speech".

The IDE is not needed to build Octave. AFAIK, I'm only using the "free 
software" components of Xcode to build Octave.

        http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

For a list of tools and their associated licenses see the link below.

        http://developer.apple.com/opensource/tools/xcodetools2.2.html

The licenses associated with these tools can be cross-referenced with the list 
below.

        http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

If there are any licenses, or tools, that look problematic, please bring them 
up so that we can look into the details further.

Ben