installing Forge packages that depend on external libraries

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 21:00:47 +0100, ederag wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 06, 2016 23:38:26 Oliver Heimlich wrote:
> > Colin, Sebastian, Kai,
> > 
> > thanks for checking.  The crlibm library installs and works correctly on
> > your machines.
> > 
> > The issue with mpfr.h has nothing to do with my change and should
> > equally occur when you try to install the last release from Octave Forge.
> > ...
> > > So your question is, if the interval package
> > > needs or provides an option to point to (or detect) the MPFR-installation?
> > 
> > Currently, nothing like that happens in the package.  It just tries to
> > compile with “-lmpfr” and mkoctfile should do the magic of looking up
> > libraries and includes.
> > ...
> 
> Indeed, the issue also arises with the previous interval package - on
> forge.

And any package that depends on an external library that is not
installed in a standard system location (for example database, dicom,
image-acquisition, netcdf, zeromq).

> The problem is that mkoctfile does not exactly use the flags given at
> the octave configure step:

Nor should it. The linker flags that were used to build Octave may be,
but are not necessarily, useful to finding libraries for installing
Forge packages.

I think this discussion about how to install packages that depend on
external libraries is useful, but is separate from and not the
responsibility of the interval package.

-- 
mike