Re: Compiling Octave for Mac OSX 1.6.x

[Ben Abbott]

On Feb 20, 2011, at 3:51 AM, michaeldzjap wrote:

> Hi Ben,
> 
> Thanks for your help, but I feel even more at a loss right now...
> 
> I am not at all an 'expert' when it comes to compiling an installing
> applications from the source, so forgive my ignorance.

I welcome your efforts to build from source. In the beginning it is a steep 
learning curve.

What experience do you have? Have you done any programming? Are you familiar 
with IDE's, or "make"?

> However, I find all
> the different instructions about how to build octave and it's dependencies
> that are floating around very confusing... The instructions in the
> README.MacOS differ significantly from those found at
> http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?OctaveForMac.

The instructions at wiki.octave.org won't work for MacOS 10.6.x, and were 
written for Octave 3.2.x. I'll put updating those instructions on my list of 
things to do (or maybe someone will beat me to it). In the meantime, the 
README.MacOS file at savannah is the most up to date. Unfortunately, it only 
includes the required dependencies (not the optional ones).

> For instance on the latter, the
> ./configure command often has an argument of --prefix=/usr/local for the
> dependencies while in the former (the fftw3 example) this has dissapeared
> completely.
> 
> I would like to make a fresh start and begin the whole process of building
> all dependencies from scratch, but how do I make sure my settings are clean?
> (i.e. how can I invert all steps undertaken from following
> http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?OctaveForMac if this is even possible)


After a fresh install of MacOS, the /usr/local directory is empty. To start 
fresh you can delete the *contents* that directory. Be aware that you may have 
installed other applications that have placed things there. If so they will 
need to be reinstalled. Be careful doing this, as if you accidentally delete 
/usr by mistake, you'll need to reinstall MacOS from DVD.

(1) open a Finder window

(2) From the menu  [Go -> Go to Folder] and enter /usr/local

(3) Delete the folders you see there (at a minimum delete bin, lib, & share. If 
you're not sure what to delete, let us know what you find there and we'll try 
to advise. When you delete a folder you'll have to authenticate.

If you're comfortable with the finder window, you can do the same from there  
...

(1) cd /usr/local

(2) ls -l

(3) sudo rm -r bin

(4) sudo rm -r lib

(5) sudo rm -r share

(6) sudo rm -r <other directories you'd like to delete>

Ben