Re: forge communications install failure on Mac: missing octave/config.h

[Andrew Janke]

On 12/2/19 9:59 PM, Kai Torben Ohlhus wrote:
>
> On 12/3/19 10:28 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
>> On 12/2/19 5:06 PM, Andrew Janke wrote:
>>> Hi, Octave maintainers,
>>>
>>> I'm having trouble installing the Forge communications package on macOS.
>>> Affects 4.4.1 and 5.1.0. Happens in both Octave.app and a vanilla Octave.
>>>
>>> Looks like the problem is that communications wants to use the
>>> octave/config.h header file, but it's not present in the Octave
>>> installation.
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> Does something special need to be done to get the Octave build process
>>> to install octave/config.h? Or is this maybe a bug in the build system?
>>> Or should packages not be using octave/config.h?
>> The config.h file generated by autoconf is intentionally not installed.
>> If you need info about octave configuration, there is octave-config.h
>> which is installed.  If you need the info about OS features that is
>> found in config.h, you need to do your own configuration and generate
>> your own config.h file appropriate for your source files and build system.
>>
>> For the communications package specifically, I would start by looking at
>> the patches for it that are part of mxe-octave.  I expect they already
>> deal with most build issues that you are seeing when trying to build it
>> with a current version of Octave.
>>
>> jwe
>>
>>
> Andrew, did you apply John Donoghue's patches from bug #46521 [1]?  I
> think many of those config.h issues are addressed there.  If you install
> the "vanilla" release from 2015, this might not work.
>
> Best,
> Kai

I didn't, and now that I've looked in to this, ... wow, this is pretty
complicated. I think I'm going to hold off on working with
"communications" until I better understand how Octave packages in
general work.

Cheers,
Andrew