Re: Unreliable OSX Builds

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Joel LeBlanc<address@hidden> wrote:
> Easy Jaroslav.  I didn't mean to offend anyone.

And nobody was offended, I hope :)

> The tone of my last e-mail was somewhat poor, and I apologize.

Well, no need. I'm not exactly known to be diplomatic either.

> 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.

I understand all that. Unfortunately, fixing the building process for
OSX is by far best done by OSX users. Despite using GNU/Linux, I think
supporting OSX is great, but I'm afraid I can help you here even less
than you can help yourself.

> 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.

Well, as I said, that was just bad luck. There was only a single
change to configure.in in July and in June we also had just one :D

> 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.

http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?OctaveForMac
I'm sure your updates will be welcome. Just ask for password to the wiki.

> 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.

I have no idea what "fink" is, but I take your word for that :)

> 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?

"So what?" was mainly a response to the "average Matlab user"
observation (which is probably correct) and I was curious what
conclusions you could draw from it. You'll see it's not easy.

> 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.

As one of the currently most active developers, I confess my OSX
knowledge is essentially zero. All I know is that there usually are
very long paths :)

> I was just trying to give feedback and get some help.

That was perfectly OK.
Given that I was unable to actually help you, maybe I should have
saved my breath :) Couldn't resist, I guess.

> Jaroslav, I didn't mean to be critical of you.

No, of course not. Actually, I don't think you were critical at all,
just surprised that "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." You probably expected a lot more to "passing
testing" than there really is. Usually the tarballs are released and
several regular contributors build & run test suite, and report
problems, if any. And that's about releases, not the development
sources.

> 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

lol :)

Setting up the build environment (with all deps) for Octave is not
easy even on GNU/Linux, and that is more common amongst Octavers. When
I started contributing to Octave (early 2008), it was a small victory
for me. And of course now there are more (weak) dependencies, so it's
even harder. But after you succeed, updating is usually just about "hg
pull -u; make -j2". Usually.

I hope you're still determined to become a contributor :)

regards

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz