Error loading all versions of octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Apr-2001, Paul Hubbard <address@hidden> wrote:

| To: address@hidden
| Cc: address@hidden
| Subject: Error loading all versions of octave
| 
| Bug report for Octave 2.0.16.92 configured for i386-pc-linux-gnu
| 
| Description:
| -----------
| 
|   I cannot start any version of octave. Message as follows:
| 
| octave2.1: error while loading shared libraries: 
/usr/lib/octave-2.1.33/liboctave.so.2.1.33: undefined symbol: screenheight
| 
|  The results are the same if I try other versions:
| 
| address@hidden ~] octave2.0
| octave2.0: error while loading shared libraries: 
/usr/lib/octave-2.0.16.92/liboctave.so: undefined symbol: screenheight
| address@hidden ~] octave-2.1.33 
| octave-2.1.33: error while loading shared libraries: 
/usr/lib/octave-2.1.33/liboctave.so.2.1.33: undefined symbol: screenheight

Older versions of Octave (i.e., anything but very recent CVS versions)
relied on various undocumented features of readline.  The screenheight
varialbe was one such feature.  Because of that, the Octave sources
include a copy of readline.  But your Debian distribution of Octave is
linked with the system readline library, not Octave's copy.  If your
system readline library is now version 4.2, it doesn't have
screenheight as a globally visible variable, so Octave can't use it.

The quick fixes are to either force Octave to use an older version of
readline (4.1 should work fine), or to compile Octave so that it is
statically linked to the readline library distributed with the Octave
sources.

The CVS version of Octave now uses an unmodified version of readline
4.2 and doesn't depend on any undocumented or private functions from
the readline library.  Eventually, I will remove the readline sources
from the Octave distribution and have configure check for the
necessary features.

jwe