[Techtalk] Trying to get octave to compile.

[John Clarke]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 08:44:51 +1100, Sue Stones wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 07:00 pm, John Clarke wrote:

> > it crashes), but I get the impression that you probably don't have much
> > experience with gdb, or any inclination to gain any ;-)
> 
> I don't have much experince installing things or with gdb, but that doesn't 
> mean that I have no inclination to learn. I am however exhauseted, not 

I'm sorry Sue, that was meant as a joke that obviously didn't work.  I
didn't mean that you didn't want to learn at all, just that I didn't
expect you to have any desire to have to learn how to drive gdb to
install the software.  You shouldn't have to - I'd be very unimpressed
if I had to do that whenever I wanted to install a new software
package, and I'm a software engineer who uses gdb a lot.

> Maybe my expectation is wrong, but I don't expect things to take a week or 
> more to get  installed.  

Your expectations aren't wrong.  I wouldn't expect it to take that long
either.  Part of the problem with octave is that a. they don't provide
binaries making it hard for people with limited experience in building
from source, and b. they haven't produced a stable release for about
two years.

I don't know which version of mandrake you're running, but I've just
checked and it's available as an rpm in 9.1 and 9.2.  If you're running
one of those two it might be worth grabbing the rpm and installing it
rather than trying to build from source.

> the past I have had to give up, and I would have this time if it wasn't for 
> your help, 

I'm happy to have been some help.  I don't like giving up either.

> I would have probably got Matlab working on windows in much less 
> time than this.  

Quite likely :-(

I'll try building it tomorrow and see if it runs.  I have no idea what
it's supposed to do or how to use it, but I'm not going to let a trivial
detail like that stop me :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
But the most stable box is the one that is powered down, and NT is as
close to powered-down as it is possible to get on a box with power up.
                          -  Mike Andrews