dist target, ufsparse and metis

[John W. Eaton]

I tried making the dist file and found that

  * It is no longer possible to run make dist without first building
    Octave, because we want to include the full documentation in the
    distributed tar files, which means we need to create the figures,
    and that requires that Octave is built in the tree where make dist
    is run.

  * Running make dist after running make all on a system that does not
    have all the sparse tools installed will still fail.  This is
    acceptable to me because someone who wants to make a distribution
    should be able to get the necessary tools and dependencies
    installed.

As part of installing the necessary tools and dependencies on my
system, I found that I could not build all of the cholmod package
without metis, and metis is not free software.  I thought that we
could build it and just lose performance, but it seems that the only
knob for disabling metis is -DNPARTITION, and that disables everything
in the CHOLMOD/Partition directory:

  cholmod_ccolamd.c 
  cholmod_csymamd.c
  cholmod_metis.c
  cholmod_nesdis.c

not just cholmod_metis.c.  David, do you know whether that is
intentional?  If you don't know, can you find out from Tim Davis?

By default, the ufsparse packages generate static libraries.  On my
system, building Octave with these libraries failed with:

  /usr/bin/ld: /usr/local/lib/libcholmod.a(cholmod_common.o): relocation 
R_X86_64_32S against `malloc' can not be used when making a shared object; 
recompile with -fPIC
  /usr/local/lib/libcholmod.a: could not read symbols: Bad value

so I think we need shared libraries.

At this point, I'm more interested in getting a 2.9.5 snapshot out
rather than fixing this problem, so I will probably disable the
figures in the manual for now.

It would also be useful to have a ufsparse package for various systems.
Does anyone know whether that is happening for Debian, Fedora, Cygwin,
etc.?

Thanks,

jwe