Re: [Fink-beginners] install pkg

[Alexander H. <ale...@gm...>]

> On Nov 30, 2014, at 6:23 PM, Sunil Shah <ss...@gm...> wrote:
> 
> I used fink to install packages for octave.  Make sure you have the development version of octave installed.
> 
> Sunil
> 
>> On Nov 30, 2014, at 6:07 PM, James Russell <jam...@ma...> wrote:
>> 
>> Alexander, Ben,
>> 
>> Not sure whether this is a fink or an octave problem.
>> 
>> I've used fink to install Octave (successfully as far as the basics go) on my Mac.  This took so long (> 1.5 days of building), that in the meanwhile I build a Ubuntu machine out of an old MacBook and installed Octave there too (much easier).  
>> 
>> My principal motivation for installing Octave for the present is to explore wavelet transforms after I get cut off from Matlab in a couple of weeks.  So, following instructions on Octave Wiki, I used:
>> 
>> pkg install -forge signal
>> 
>> on both.  In each case, I got a complaint that 'signal' needed 'general' and 'control'.  So, I tried 
>> 
>> pkg install -forge general 
>> 
>> I got:
>> 
>> pkg: unable to find the mkoctfile command, Octave installation is incomplete.
>> 
>> at which point progress towards my goal stopped.
>> 
>> fink problem?  Hard to know, there were literally thousands and thousands of lines of messages on the console as fink built Octave, 99.99999% of them scrolled off into the bit bucket.  A comment on this, if I may.  My recent coding experience (last several years) has been in Matlab.  I've found that if I print a lot of information to the command console, a program can take many, many times longer than if I don't.  What I do is include a command line argument 'verbose' and default it off, and send only the most essential stuff to the console.  A typical user, I expect, will not benefit from the thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of feedback at the console, but would benefit from substantially speedier execution.  Seriously, I thought it was possible it was in an endless loop, and considered killing it.  1.5 days is not hyperbole - it really took that long.
>> 
>> octave problem?  I don't know.  It's octave that is making the complaint.
>> 
>> 
>> In any case, wherever the problem comes from, any idea how to remedy it?  I looked in Fink Commander, but it found nothing on searching for mkoctfile.
>> 
>> Is there a light at the end of this tunnel?
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks for your generous help.
>> 
>> Jim
>> 


In general, you’re probably best off using Fink to install your Octave Forge packages (though I haven’t had time to package all of them up just yet), because some of them need patching to build on OS X, or at least for Fink, and a bare “pkg install...” will fail.  

Try “fink install signal-oct382”.  This will install the appropriate octave*-dev package, where “-dev” doesn’t mean “development version” but “portion of the package which is required for package development (building) but not at runtime”, which includes mkoctfile as well as all of the headers.  I do a separate package version for each Octave version because the default Octave build process breaks library compatibility with every new release and I didn’t want to have to mass-update all of the Octave Forge packages each time.

You also might want to enable the binary distribution.  More on that without bothering the Octave list.
-- 
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison