Re: use of ATLAS library in octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Oct-2007, Himanshu B. Dave wrote:

| Precompiled binaries have their own problems. For one, they are tied
| to a particular distribution.
| 
| One can not easily change the installed distribution A, just because to
| use some package B, distribution C has to be used.
| 
| Also, most of the distributions like Debian, Suse, Red-hat have trimmed the
| code (and more importantly  kernel)  which are away from  standard linux
| kernels.
| This can create  a lot of problems, if the package you are trying to install
| is using
| a different library or unknown library.
| 
| This is a problem, to be accepted as such and dealt with.

I guess I don't understand what you are talking about here.

| I am sure octave team would like it to be used on as many version of Linux,
| other
| Unix like systems and  :( MS-Windows. By saying that "if you want to use
| octave
| get a binary distribution" are we not going some-what away from the spirit
| of OSS
| and Free Software?

I don't see it that way.  Octave is still freely available.  You can
still build it from source if that's what you want to do.  But why
would you waste your time doing that unless you really needed to?

| If I am going to use octave or any other software for a
| serious
| work, I would like to be able to look into the source C/C++ or whatever it
| is.

Having a binary distribution is not preventing you from looking at the
source.  In fact, the GPL requires that people who distribute binaries
also distribute the exact sources that they used for building the
package.

Do you try to install everything you use from source?  If so, you are
not the normal user.  Most users want to get something installed
quickly, so I think they are happy to use binary packages.  They work
fine for most people.

| John has said somewhere "it is tricky if you do not know what you are
| doing."

I said this because there are many dependencies.  On some systems it
is as easy as

  apt-get build-dep octave2.9

to install all of them (at least most of the time).  On other systems,
it can be a big PITA to find and install everything.  That's too bad,
but we are not going to assume the responsibility for packaging and
coordinating all of those external dependencies on all of the N
systems where it is possible to build Octave.  OTOH, we do make an
effort to make these external packages optional, so if you don't care
about having every bit of the functionality, you should still be able
to build Octave even if you can't get some of the dependencies to
build on your system.

| Please allow me some amount of knowledge and skill,

Likewise, you should not assume we are idiots, which is the way your
earlier message came across, at least to me.

| As for the "confusion" it was started because of a wrong library in the
| octave
| distribution. I am not blaming any one, in fact I am acutely aware of the
| tremendous
| amount of work that has gone into octave.

So, there was a small bug.  Someone else already noticed it and it's
been fixed.

| like myself, who dare to install from source!

If you want to install from source, I think you have to assume that
there will be occasional problems.

jwe