Minor configure item and Fedora 9

[John W. Eaton]

On  2-Jun-2008, Michael D. Godfrey wrote:

| John,
| > Or, even if the files BLAS files distributed with Octave are
| > sufficient, they are not yet compiled when the test is performed.
| 
| It appears that I did not make this very clear.
| I understand what happened, and I figured it out by reading through 
| config.log
| and configure.  That is how I discovered that the message at the end of
| the output from ./configure which said:
| CHOLMOD library not found
| really meant that CHOLMOD library was found, but BLAS library was
| missing.
| 
| This is not a big deal. I just thought that a clearer message might be
| helpful.

I don't see how to fix this problem.  As I recall it occurs when
configure can't find a BLAS library, so it falls back on the one
distributed with Octave.  But at the time the check for CHOLMOD
happens, the BLAS library that is distributed with Octave is not
installed or even compiled, so I don't see how to make the test
succeed in that case, as linking without a BLAS library will
apparently always fail.

Perhaps we should simply stop distributing BLAS and LAPACK libraries
with Octave and require them to be installed in order to build Octave?

Or, should we omit the test for CHOLMOD if an installed BLAS library
is missing?  In that case, we could simply issue a message like

  configure: no BLAS library installed; falling back on reference
             sources distributed with Octave

and later:

  configure: skipping CHOLMOD test because BLAS library is not installed

but then I suspect that would still confuse some people...

jwe