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Re: what to do about dependencies?


From: Alexander Hansen
Subject: Re: what to do about dependencies?
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:09:21 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0

On 1/6/12 11:36 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> People often complain that building Octave is too complicated.  The
> problem is usually that it is too hard to get dependencies installed,
> and we don't even have a complete statement of what dependencies are
> needed or where to get them.  One only finds out by running configure.
> 
> I've tried to help improve that situation slightly with the following
> patch to document the dependencies and where to find their sources:
> 
>   http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/87f06b9990bb
> 
> I'm not pretending that this is perfect or complete, but it is a
> start.
> 
> For the future, I think we should consider including at least the
> required dependencies (GNU Readline, PCRE, BLAS+LAPACK (ATLAS?)) and
> all numerical library dependencies (ARPACK, FFTW3, GLPK, Qhull,
> QRUPDATE, and SuiteSparse) with Octave.  Then we could arrange for the
> configure script to automatically fall back to the included packages
> if these libraries are not already installed, or if there is some
> problem with them that would prevent them from being used.  There
> could also be a summary message from configure explaining that this is
> happening so that the user would have a chance to fix the system
> problems and run configure again instead of just using the included
> software.
> 
> I'm not sure whether we should consider including other libraries as
> well.  The cURL, HDF5, and zlib libraries might be fairly easy, but
> something like GraphicsMagick++ itself requires several more libraries
> and I don't think we want to attempt including everything down to the
> level of the C library (!).  But the list above would go a long way to
> avoiding the complaints we see about how hard it is to build Octave
> and dependencies.  At least running configure and make would work and
> build a copy of Octave that would run, though perhaps without graphics
> capabilities.
> 
> We could also have configure options to force the included libraries
> to be used instead of the system libraries.  That way we would be able
> to point to a set of package versions that are known to work.
> 
> I'm not proposing that we do this for the 3.6.0 release, but that we
> consider it for 3.8.0.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> jwe

That sounds OK as long as the bundled packages are just fallbacks.  As a
downstream packager, I'd definitely prefer to use packages from my
distribution when possible.


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