Re: Geometry Chapter of the manual

[John W. Eaton]

On 24-Jul-2007, Thomas Weber wrote:

| The real question is the "normal" user at home who wants to have the
| latest and greatest CVS snapshot with everything including the kitchen
| sink: compiling everything yourself can be hard and surely is
| time-consuming.

It is not difficult if you are using a distribution that already has
the external packages.  For debian, getting the build dependencies is
just one apt-get command.  For Fedora, Quentin posted a simple set of
commands.  Is it our fault that Windows, OS X, Solaris, HP-UX,
etc. don't have useful standard package systems?  And in any case, I
think dependencies on external packages are all optional, so even if
we are talking about the problem of depending on a new external
library that is not yet packaged, then it is still possible to build a
working copy of Octave, though it will be missing some features.  I
don't see that this is a big problem.

When I build Octave on a system that doesn't have a nice environment,
the usual problem for me is the dependence on TeX for building the
documentation, but avoiding that is as simple as commenting out the
doc directory in the main octMakefile.  Even that could be handled
more gracefully, and I would consider patches.

jwe