Re: Problems with mkoctfile in new Octave 3.4.1

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Jun-2011, José Luis García Pallero wrote:

| I'm trying to compile the mercurial sources with the last mkoctfile
| fix patch and when I execute ./autogen.sh in order to generate the
| configure script the proccess is waiting for a long time in the step
| "Cloning into gnulib...". I'm waiting since 10 minutes and autogen.sh
| is not terminated. The messages of ./autogen.sh is:
| 
| address@hidden:~/Desktop/octave$ ./autogen.sh
| generating source lists for liboctave/Makefile...
| generating doc/interpreter/images.mk...
| generating src/DLD-FUNCTIONS/module.mk...
| bootstrapping...
| build-aux/bootstrap: Bootstrapping from checked-out octave sources...
| build-aux/bootstrap: getting gnulib files...
| Cloning into gnulib...
| 
| Is needed any order previous to ./autogen.sh in order to build Octave
| from Mercurial sources? I'm in Debian Sid and I have installed the
| autotools insfrastructure (autoconf 2.68, automake 1.11.1, etc)

One fix is to edit the bootstrap script and change the lines

    shallow=
    git clone -h 2>&1 | grep -- --depth > /dev/null && shallow='--depth 2'
    git clone $shallow git://git.sv.gnu.org/gnulib "$gnulib_path" ||
      cleanup_gnulib

to

    git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/gnulib "$gnulib_path" || cleanup_gnulib

I reported this problem in April:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2011-04/msg00227.html

Maybe you could report it again, or revive that thread to let someone
know it is still failing?

In any case, if you just want to fix your 3.4.0 installation, there is
really no need to build a complete new version of Octave from scratch.
You can just install 3.4.0 and then cd to $prefix/bin and do

  mv mkoctfile mkoctfile-3.4.0
  ln -s mkoctfile-3.4.0 mkoctfile
  mv octave-config octave-config-3.4.0
  ln -s octave-config-3.4.0 octave-config

jwe