Re: binary RPMs of Octave stable for enterprise Linux systems

[Mike Miller]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 06:13:19PM -0400, Michael D Godfrey wrote:
> On 07/29/2012 04:53 PM, Thomas Yengst wrote:
> >I have built Octave 3.6.2 RPMs for CentOS-5 and Scientific Linux 6
> >and am happy to build for other flavors of Linux if there is interest
> >and a place to store them.
> I have been building current versions for Fedora RHEL 5 systems
> because there are people who depend on me to do it.  The last system I
> built there is 3.6.2.  I could summarize what was needed to get that
> working. But, also, I suspect that I will need to do it again for the
> next release. LLVM may, for example, be a problem.  There is no llvm
> at all in the RHEL 5 repositories.
> 
> I know that RHEL 5 is ancient history, but there are quite a few sites
> that are essentially locked into it.  Some, but not necessarily all,
> of their software suppliers support newer RHEL systems, and RedHat
> says that the only "safe" way to move from 5 to newer versions is to
> do fresh installs.  Upgrading is not an option.  This is close to
> impossible at sites where there are many RHEL 5 systems.  The idea of
> doing them all at once with some fallback in case it goes wrong is
> practically impossible since it also means switching versions of all
> the tools that are in use.  It does not appear that the RedHat folks
> have thought this through.  Therefore, there will be sites sitting at
> RHEL 5 at most for the foreseeable future.

Same here, I have an interest in keeping RHEL 5 compatibility for
certain systems I am working with. I've had success building and running
it myself. I agree LLVM will be a problem, but as long as it can be
optionally disabled we still have an Octave that will build and run
functionally equivalent.

I have on my list to work through some libcurl incompatibilities I've
run into that will allow the urlwrite functions and ftp class to work on
RHEL 5.

-- 
mike