octave doesn't build DSO's with -fPIC

[Ben Abbott]

On Thursday, December 06, 2007, at 03:03PM, "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu> wrote:
>On  6-Dec-2007, Jack Howarth wrote:
>
>|    I noticed while building octave 2.9.18 on Leopard that, for
>| Darwin at least, octave is not properly using the -fPIC compiler
>| flag when creating objects for shared libraries. Linking non-PIC
>| code into shared libraries can introduce obscure bugs and is
>| discouraged.
>
>Perhaps this is the real source of all the trouble on Intel Mac OS X
>systems.  Would someone please try the following patch and see if it
>fixes the problems?  After applying it, you'll need to run
>
>  ./autogen.sh
>
>to regenerate the configure script, then configure and build as usual.
>
>Since the lines that are changed should be copied verbatim into the
>configure script, you might also get away with patching configure
>directly.
>
>jwe
>

I don't consider my results to be conclusive. I compiled octave using g95, but the dependencies may have used gfortran.

./configure '--prefix=/sw'  '--infodir=${prefix}/share/info' '--mandir=${prefix}/share/man' '--libexecdir=${prefix}/lib' '--build=i386-apple-darwin' 'build_alias=i386-apple-darwin' 'CFLAGS=-O0 -g -ggdb3' 'LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib' 'CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/include' 'CXXFLAGS=-O0 -g -ggdb3' 'F77=/sw/bin/g95' 'FFLAGS=-O0'

In any event, the problem with strptime apparently remains. During "make check"

  scripts/time/datevec.m .................................panic: Bus error -- stopping myself...

John, is there a simple way to force the configure process to treat my system's strptime as being broken? (I'm a matlab/octave and fortran guy, and quickly get lost looking at shell scripts and c/c++ code).

Ben