The tone of my last e-mail was somewhat poor, and I apologize.
I'm just saying that I don't have the necessary skills to help out here, and it's frustrating because I really like the idea of octave, and would like to contribute. I can help by reporting bugs, and I can help by contributing m-code, but if the project won't build I'm pretty much useless.
Since I starting following things (a few weeks before the last release), I have been updating every day and Octave has only built maybe 10% of the time. There are no instructions for OSX, and the documentation I have found says nothing about the huge number of configure parameters that is apparently needed. I'm not even sure if you're supposed to have lines like that, but after I couldn't get it to work I modified what a fink maintainer had done. For all I know, I'm going about this in entirely the wrong way.
Maybe "So what?" is the response we want to have, but if that's the case, what kind of community can we hope to develop? Perhaps the group is too small to support OSX (it feels like it's just Ben and I), or maybe none of the core developers even have access to an OSX box, I don't know. I was just trying to give feedback and get some help.
Jaroslav, I didn't mean to be critical of you. You are replying to pretty much every e-mail, and from what I can tell, are involved in the majority of the development. I was kinda hoping you wouldn't even respond, and I would here back from one of the NUMEROUS OSX users... all of whom build regularly, and without fail... who would respond with the secret build script. : D
Cheers,
~Joel
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:11 AM, Jaroslav Hajek
<address@hidden> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Joel LeBlanc<
address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm not nearly talented enough to get this thing built with any confidence.
> For a while, I "fixed" something by adding "-L/sw/lib/fltk-aqua/lib
> -L/sw/lib/flex/lib -L/sw/lib -lfltk_gl -lfltk" to the configure statement
> (see my original post).
> It seems that autoconf is completely unaware that port and fink produce /opt
> and /sw folders that are highly likely to contain the libraries your gonna
> need. I'd try to help, but seriously, my ineptitude in such matters is
> staggering ; )
> What worries me is that it won't build... regularly.
John was making major changes to the configuration part. I think it's
mostly settled, but if things still don't work for you, more tweaks
are probably needed. I hope you understand, though, that without OSX
users actually participating in development there's not much chance to
ensure flawless builds on OSX.
> It released without being able to be built. How can this thing possibly be passing testing, and
> get to a released, if it won't even build?
Believe it or not, the release did build for a lot of people - in
fact, nobody reported a build failure, so that's why it was released.
Had you participated in the testing, you could have made a difference.
> It's too bad. I'd really like to contribute to testing (I'm a power Matlab
> user), but I'm basically being left out. Imagine the average Matlab user,
> they're not going to tweak configure flags.
So what?
> As a result, they'll never even
> have a chance to give feedback because it'll never build.
> I guess bringing it up in the forums (is this really a forum?), is the best
> way to start moving toward a fix.
Well, yes, but it's like "going out of your door is the best way to
start hiking". Someone needs to find out what's wrong, work out a fix,
make a patch and then apply it. I (and not just I) will gladly do the
last bit for you and possibly even assist you in the third one.
> Thanks for the feedback guys!
> ~Joel
>
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz