From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Fri Feb 14 15:29:28 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: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 15:28:10 -0600

On 14-Feb-1997, Rick Perry <perry at ece dot vill dot edu> wrote:

| Quoting John W. Eaton,
| >
| > ... (Or maybe just giving up on dynamic linking for the
| > binary distributions -- it certainly does seem to cause a lot of
| > trouble...)
| 
| That is my conclusion.  I see nothing wrong with binary distributions
| having less installation flexibility and options (shared vs. static) than
| source distributions.

Since I'd rather not waste much more time on this, I decided to
simplify things so that all you will have to do is this

  tar zxf octave-2.0.3.tar.gz
  make binary-dist

to create a binary distribution that includes a statically linked
version of Octave.  It won't support dynamic linking, and it won't
include any libraries or header files.  If people want something else,
they can do the work to make it happen.

|  I don't think it should be your responsibility to
| create binaries for every possible system configuration, just the basics.
| Keeping flexibility and portability in the source distribution and
| configuration is the main concern in such a large software project.
| That's my 2.5 cents...

I agree, though I was willing to try to do something more than that if
it wasn't too hard.  Unfortunately, it is.  I would prefer to have the
binary distributions support dynamic linking, but I think it's more
important for them to work reliably.

Thanks,

jwe