Re: what to do about dependencies?

[Ben Abbott]

On Jan 8, 2012, at 4:35 PM, Robert T. Short wrote:

> John W. Eaton wrote:
>> People often complain that building Octave is too complicated.  The
>> problem is usually that it is too hard to get dependencies installed,
>> and we don't even have a complete statement of what dependencies are
>> needed or where to get them.  One only finds out by running configure.
>> 
>> I've tried to help improve that situation slightly with the following
>> patch to document the dependencies and where to find their sources:
>> 
>>   http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/87f06b9990bb
>> 
>> I'm not pretending that this is perfect or complete, but it is a
>> start.
>> 
>> For the future, I think we should consider including at least the
>> required dependencies (GNU Readline, PCRE, BLAS+LAPACK (ATLAS?)) and
>> all numerical library dependencies (ARPACK, FFTW3, GLPK, Qhull,
>> QRUPDATE, and SuiteSparse) with Octave.  Then we could arrange for the
>> configure script to automatically fall back to the included packages
>> if these libraries are not already installed, or if there is some
>> problem with them that would prevent them from being used.  There
>> could also be a summary message from configure explaining that this is
>> happening so that the user would have a chance to fix the system
>> problems and run configure again instead of just using the included
>> software.
>> 
>> I'm not sure whether we should consider including other libraries as
>> well.  The cURL, HDF5, and zlib libraries might be fairly easy, but
>> something like GraphicsMagick++ itself requires several more libraries
>> and I don't think we want to attempt including everything down to the
>> level of the C library (!).  But the list above would go a long way to
>> avoiding the complaints we see about how hard it is to build Octave
>> and dependencies.  At least running configure and make would work and
>> build a copy of Octave that would run, though perhaps without graphics
>> capabilities.
>> 
>> We could also have configure options to force the included libraries
>> to be used instead of the system libraries.  That way we would be able
>> to point to a set of package versions that are known to work.
>> 
>> I'm not proposing that we do this for the 3.6.0 release, but that we
>> consider it for 3.8.0.
>> 
>> Comments?
>> 
>> jwe
> 
> I think you are releasing a chimera.  You will chase it for hours and just 
> end up with more problems.  The current situation isn't that horrible.
> 
> Bob

I'd like the idea of bundling the dependencies as it would simplify creating an 
app-bundle for MacOS X (windows too, I assume).

Ben