Re: installing packages under windows

[marco atzeri]

On 6/24/2012 5:13 AM, hydrodog wrote:
> The package installation in octave is somewhat bewildering.
> There are three related questions here.
> 1. How to get the fits package working under cygwin.

Dear hydrodog,
first you need to port to cygwin also the fictsio library
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/

> 2. How to get any package working standalone in Windows 7.  It is ok if I
> have to use cygwin to build the code, but can I package the binaries so that
> someone not using cygwin could use these packages with octave under windows?

No. Cygwin code require the cygwin library as posix system

> 3. Why is there no prebuilt library set of everything, including all
> libraries used by the libraries?  Surely, if someone wants to do curve
> fitting in Windows, requiring this laborious process is ridiculous.  I'm
> willing to build some of this, or even all of it, but if I do so, why should
> anyone else have to?  Is there a big problem with a makefile that builds all
> of this?  I'm willing to contribute but something tells me there's much more
> to this than meets the eye.

everything require a lot of time, and we lack it.
On cygwin I am the only maintainer for a lot of math packages

> Forgetting for the moment about trying to do it to a standalone windows
> version of octave, I just installed in cygwin.  So now the environment is
> essentially linux, with gcc-4.5.3 installed.
>
> I started with fits-1.0.1.tar.gz because I happen to want to do an
> exponential fit.

FITS is "Flexible Image Transport System",  I do not see how exponential
fit is related. Looking in the wrong direction ?
Could you clarify your needs ?

> in the directory with the package, within octave:
>
> octave:7>pkg install fits-1.0.1.tar.gz
>
> Package cfitsio was not found in the pkg-config search path.
> Perhaps you should add the directory containing `cfitsio.pc'
> to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
>
> First of all, there is no documentation on what cfitsio is.  There is no
> file cfitsio.pc.  Is there some library external to fits that is needed?  It
> would be nice if it said that somewhere.
>
> pkg install optim-1.0.10.tar.gz

optim is already part of the octave-forge binary bundle, no need to
rebuild it by yourself.
Install octave-forge and use "pkg load optim"

> fails because it needs struct.  At least that's comprehensible.
> After installing struct, it works, with warnings
>
> octcdf fails because it needs netcdf, so I got and built the latest C
> library 4.2
> pkg install octcdf-1.1.4.tar.gz

nectcdf-4.2 is available on cygwin. I ported it when I added octcdf some 
time ago as part of octave-forge bundle

Look here for all the packages already available on cygwin
http://cygwin.com/packages/

> then fails because of lots of missing symbols, an example:
> .../Downloads/code/netcdf-4.2/libsrc4/nc4hdf.c:759: undefined reference to
> `_H5Sselect_hyperslab'
> This last one is netcdf specific, but since there are so many errors I can't
> see the first ones, how can I redirect pkg install output

my solution when building the octave add-on packages is

echo on
diary ../../build/diary
more off
"pkg install -verbose" octcdf-1.1.4.tar.gz


regards
Marco