Re: trouble compiling

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-May-2012, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

| On 05/19/2012 09:30 AM, Mike Miller wrote:
|
| > IMHO Octave is going above and beyond with these warnings and extra
| > checks for maintainer tools.  The checks in configure and any warning
| > messages it produces are mostly for users, not maintainers, who are
| > strictly building from a properly released source tarball.  And those
| > users don't need these maintainer tools to build Octave.
| 
| I don't completely agree with that.  It might be excessive in the case 
| of common utilities like gperf (are those what you are calling 
| maintainer tools? gperf, bison, etc.?),

Yes, these are maintainer tools.  You don't need them if you are
building from an unmodified tarball.  Not making a big fuss about
maintainer tools and expecting maintainers to have them installed is
fairly common.

| but there are many advanced 
| packages like ARPACK and FFTW that I want to have knowledge about when 
| building.

These are library dependencies, not maintainer tools.

| Is "make maintainer-clean" a sort of GNU projects standard?

Yes.  I suggest reading the GNU coding standards.

| Also, HACKING isn't a file name I would look to as a developer.  That is 
| where I would go if I ran into some obscure, non-standard problem and I 
| needed to hack a solution.

No matter what file names we choose, there will always be problems
with misunderstandings based on individual differences in what is
"expected".  And then there is the larger problem of people just not
reading the info that is available.

jwe