control-2.6.1 build problem on OS X 10.6.8 and workaround solution

[John Hayes]

Dear maintainers,

I was able to get the image package installed on my OS X 10.6.8 into Octave 3.8.0 (gcc 4.8.2), but I had a bit of a hiccup along the way.

When trying to install control-2.6.1 (a dependency of ‘signal’, which 'image’ itself depends on I believe) using ‘pkg install -forge control’ I got an error message about the lack of table of contents for slicotlibrary.a when it was building the package.

Here was my workaround solution:

- manually downloaded control-2.6.1.tar.gz from Octave Forge

- unpacked it

- cd control/src

- make

(then it dies with this message:

   LFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib/octave/3.8.0 -L/usr/local/lib  -framework vecLib -L/usr/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0/4.8.2 -L/usr/local/lib/gcc/x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0/4.8.2/../../.. -lgfortran -lquadmath -lm" \

    mkoctfile __control_slicot_functions__.cc common.cc slicotlibrary.a

ld: in slicotlibrary.a, archive has no table of contents

- to solve this, I typed 'ranlib slicotlibrary.a' and re-'make' (I got the idea from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4445735/why-do-i-get-ld-in-libunittest-a-archive-has-no-table-of-contents-when-bui)

- then tar/gzipped the 'control' directory as control-2.6.1.tar.gz and installed it into octave with the following as normal

-pkg install control-2.6.1

I don’t know what the proper, platform-independent solution is otherwise I would offer to submit a fix. Maybe it’s simply to call ‘ranlib slicotlibrary.a’ before the call to mkoctfile in the Makefile?

Many thanks for such a great suite of software, and I appreciate any suggestions you may have.

Best regards,

John