Re: Having problem building on macOS Mojave

[Andrew Janke]

Hi Thomas,

Sorry you're having trouble.

On 1/10/19 1:57 PM, ThomasScofield wrote:
> I have recently upgraded to MacOS Mojave.  I did a re-install of Octave from
> Homebrew.  The installation seemed to go fine, and the software starts up in
> a terminal window without incident.  One of the first things I do after an
> install is to check that plots work.  Plotting a simple cosine graph
>
>    xs = 0:.1:2*pi;
>    plot(xs, cos(xs))
>
> caused program termination with the message
>
> fatal: caught signal Segmentation fault: 11 -- stopping myself...
> Segmentation fault: 11

It looks like the Homebrew core octave formula has recently dropped the 
patches it uses, so it is no longer picking up the patches for these two 
bugs:

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55268
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?50025

Those bugs manifest with seg faults and hangs, so you could be running 
in to one of those. The octave-head-test formula does include these 
patches, which could explain why the crash went away when you switched 
to using it.

> I've been trolling through maintainers messages, and it seems segfaults have
> been a topic of conversation recently, perhaps in connection with the latest
> MacOS releases.  I uninstalled/reinstalled Homebrew and started with a clean
> slate, but without change.  I have been out of the install-from-source world
> for a while, so have shied away from parts of the discussion that involved
> playing with software on which Octave is dependent, or running
> make/configure.  Following Andrew's note, I did this
>
>   brew tap octave-app/octave-app-bases
>   brew install --HEAD octave-head-test
>
> which ran through OK (several notes about keg-only software that wasn't
> symlinked, or export for commands should a compiler need to find something),

Those notes are probably all fine, and expected; they're issued for any 
keg-only
formulae, of which octave uses a few. The octave or octave-head-test 
formula will automatically take care of those export commands for you 
when it does the build.

> and gave me a working version of Octave.  That is, as before, I can start it
> up in a terminal and do basic stuff.  The plot command that brought on a
> segfault with the earlier install now does not cause a crash.  In fact, a
> figure window appears, and everything seems to work OK, excepting the fact
> that the figure window remains blank.  Other graphic-generating commands act
> similarly.
>
> Perhaps this is relevant: since starting anew with Homebrew, I have used it
> to install qt but not gnuplot.

Shouldn't matter. The octave or octave-head-test formulae will 
automatically install all their dependencies.

I couldn't reproduce this "blank figure window" behavior on macOS 
10.13.6 High Sierra using octave-head-test: running your code, the plot 
appears fine for me there.

On 10.14.2 Mojave, I can reproduce your exact behavior: the figure 
window is blank after doing a plot(). (I set up a 10.14.2 Mojave VM for 
testing.) Screen shot attached. Happens when I do it from the GUI 
(`octave --gui`) too.

Resizing the figure window a bit causes the plot graphics to appear. 
They're mis-scaled for me; probably a Retina scaling issue. Screen shot 
#2 attached. That's probably because octave-head-test does not include 
the patch for https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?49053.

Does resizing the figure window make plot graphics appear for you?

No idea what's causing it. I can just say it looks like new behavior in 
Mojave.

(I had to install it with `brew install --HEAD octave-head-test 
--without-docs` to avoid having to install MacTex on the test box.)

For what it's worth, I'm also having another hang with octave-head-test: 
if I fire up `octave --gui` and choose the octave-gui > Preferences menu 
item, and then close the Preferences pane, the Octave GUI locks up 
(spinning beachball) and I have have to Force Quit it. (This is on macOS 
10.13.6; doesn't seem to happen on 10.14.)

Would you mind sharing your full build logs so we can see exactly what 
your Octave was built with? You can do this with `brew gist-logs 
octave-head-test` and sending along the resulting URL. Here's mine for 
reference.

https://gist.github.com/0cd9d0ee233f4d7bc782475653e16336

I don't see anything weird in there, offhand.

Cheers,
Andrew

Screen Shot 2019-01-10 at 5.28.20 PM.png
Description: PNG image

Screen Shot 2019-01-10 at 6.30.46 PM.png
Description: PNG image