[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI friendly to new users

[Tim Mooney]

In regard to: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI...:

> I plan to try building
> Octave again. It's got a ludicrously complex set of dependencies. Octave
> is the one thing I will use Linux for. Because it uses autotools it
> completely failed to build the last time I tried.

I assure you the failure wasn't because of autotools.

I just tried building octave on recent OI.  I'm missing a slew of its
dependencies (you weren't kidding about those) but I have everything
that it strictly requires installed.

There are two minor compile issues, both cases where they're doing the
wrong thing for host os != Linux, but those are both easy and obvious
fixes.

The big issue you're going to run into is that it wants to link a shared
library with the system 'libgfortran.a', and OI's gfortran library was
not compiled PIC, so the link fails:

   CXXLD    liboctave/liboctave.la
ld: fatal: relocation error: R_AMD64_TPOFF32: file /usr/gcc/14/lib/amd64/libgfortran.a(async.o): symbol thread_unit: relocation illegal when building a shared object
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

The octave developers designed their 'configure' script so that it exits
if you attempt to build only static libraries, so I can't use the standard
method to tell configure to not try build shared libraries.

You would either need to build your own libgfortran that's compiled with
position-independent code or the OI gcc 14 component would need to be
updated to also build libgfortran PIC.

I can create diffs for the two easy compile issues if you like, but
they're not much use without solving the bigger issue of non-PIC
libgfortran.

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure /
Division of Information Technology    /                701-231-1076 (Voice)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164