relocating octave and PKG_ADD problems.

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-Dec-2010, Ian Stokes-Rees wrote:

| I installed octave on one machine and then packaged it up and copied the
| binaries and libraries to another machine (in fact, to several other
| machines).  By setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH and OCTAVE_HOME I *almost* have
| it working, it seems, but I still get problems that I can't resolve.  I
| don't have root access or any easy ability to compile on the remote
| machines where I run Octave, so I really need to have a "drop-in"
| pre-compiled self-supporting tar ball.

I think the easiest way to do that would be to configure with --prefix
set to the directory where you plan to install.  Then you should be
able to use DESTDIR to install everything under a temporary directory,
tar the resulting directory tree, then unpack on the target machine.

| The first problem I get is that Octave it can't find the "system"
| M-files (e.g. standard functions like num2str()), so I tried:

It should be sufficient just to set OCTAVE_HOME in the environment.

The following works for me:

  tar zxf octave-3.2.4.tar.gz
  ./configure --prefix=/tmp/jwe1
  make
  make install DESTDIR=/tmp/jwe2

This creates a directory tree called tmp/jwe1 below /tmp/jwe2.  Then
to run Octave from this directory, I can do

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/jwe2/tmp/jwe1/lib/octave-3.2.4 \
  OCTAVE_HOME=/tmp/jwe2/tmp/jwe1 \
  /tmp/jwe2/tmp/jwe1/bin/octave

Then I can move this to the intended directory (the one specified by
--prefix at configure time):

  cd /tmp/jwe2
  tar cf - tmp | ( cd / ; tar xf - )

and finally, run Octave without having to specify LD_LIBRARY_PATH or
OCTAVE_HOME:

  /tmp/jwe1/bin/octave

I don't see any errors when compiling/installing/starting Octave this way.

jwe