Minor configure item and Fedora 9

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:11 PM, John W. Eaton <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu> wrote:
> 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
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>

Here's an idea taken from FreeFEM++ (but probably used elsewhere):
we put BLAS and LAPACK away from libcruft, but allow configure (or
make?) to download and build them (using wget or something similar)
from www.netlib.org if they're not found.
In fact the same can be done with SuiteSparse, Qhull, fftw and perhaps
others. I recall that when I used to compile FreeFEM++, I found this
feature really useful, as it made a full install with all libraries a
piece of cake.

regards
-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz