Re: what to do about dependencies?

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 01/06/2012 09:37 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

I'm not sure if finding dependencies is the issue people are having.
Building them seems to be the problem, so if we want to alleviate this
situation, we would have to fix the build systems of the dependencies?
This seems like a lot of boring work.

- Jordi G. H.

"Finding the dependencies" is an issue for quite a few people. But, it
is mostly at the trivial level of connecting the names used in the messages
from ./configure with what needs to be installed.  This is pretty easy to make
clearer and John's patch helps with that.  (Jordi: remember there are
people who are not like you: they do not even know the "right" name
of a dependency! But, they do know enough to benefit a lot from using
Octave.) 

Speeding up the build would be nice, but I do not think it is a big problem
except for the serious developers.  For a person who just wants the
"very latest" version the current time is OK.  Improving the compile times
and removing any "unneeded" recompiles, etc., would be a lot of work.
Better to work on improvements to Octave itself.

Michael