From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Thu Feb  6 10:54:44 1997
Subject: Re: Octave 2.0.2 : linking error on alpha-dec-osf3.2
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Rick Perry <perry at ece dot vill dot edu>
cc: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1997 10:53:25 -0600

On  6-Feb-1997, Rick Perry <perry at ece dot vill dot edu> wrote:

| If the binary distribution was statically linked with the octave and c++
| libraries, wouldn't that eliminate the need for -R and LD_LIBRARY_PATH?
| I configured mine on Solaris 2.5.1 with just './configure' and no command-
| line options; ldd on the resulting binary says:
| 
| 	libdl.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libdl.so.1
| 	libsocket.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libsocket.so.1
| 	libm.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libm.so.1
| 	libc.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libc.so.1
| 	libnsl.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libnsl.so.1
| 	libintl.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libintl.so.1
| 	libmp.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libmp.so.1
| 	libw.so.1 =>	 /usr/lib/libw.so.1
| 
| which are all standard system dynamic libraries.

That means you probably don't have a shared version of libstdc++.

| But maybe you have
| other reasons for wanting dynamically linked binary distributions...

No, I just thought that since I was creating the shared libraries, I
should use them with the distributed binary.

One of the goals was to allow people to build their own .oct files,
but the binary distributions don't contain the necessary .h and .cc
files for that to work (yet).  My reason for not distributing the
necessary .h and .cc files was that I assumed that people who were
going to be writing C++ code would be capable of compiling Octave.

If I do add the .h and .cc files to the binary distributions so that
people can build .oct files without having to also compile Octave, 
then I suppose it would be ok to distribute a statically linked binary
along with the shared library files so that people could link their
code without creating 2MB .oct files.

If people want to do better than that, they can re-link (to allow
that, I could also distribute octave.o and builtins.o, which are the
only files needed other than the shared libraries).

So, we could have just two binary distributions for each system (one
with debugging symbols, the other stripped).  They would contain the
following things:

  statically linked octave binary

  all the README files and scripts for installing octave

  the doc files

  the .m files

  if shared libraries and dynamic linking are supported:

    the script for building .oct files

    shared libraries, octave.o, and builtins.o

    all .oct files

    all .h and .cc files that are needed for building .oct files

  anything else?


Any comments?

Thanks,

jwe