octave-forge dependency?

[Chris Taylor]

James R. Phillips wrote:
> Chris Taylor wrote:
> 
> 
>>This doesn't solve the core problem that configure will pick up the >presence
> 
> of cygwin's tetex and expect it - the cygwin tetex install >would need to be
> masked entirely in order to use miktex and not >have configure expect tetex..
> 
> 
> OK, it seems an elaboration of the idea could though.  The autoconf/automake
> environment needs to be like octave, while the rest of the time, you want
> miktex in the front of the path.  Wouldn't executing
> 
> export PATH=$PATH_FOR_OCTAVE
> 
> before starting ./configure work for that purpose?
> 
> jrp
> 

No.

Two things: Firstly, the OP _doesn't_ want his configure scripts picking 
up tetex, ergo tetex must not be in the path.
Secondly, tetex installs (at least last time I checked) in such a way 
that it's located automatically by configure scripts (given that it's in 
the default path).
The only way to stop this behaviour is to
a) completely trash the cygwin path, and thus lose 99% of the functionality
b) install tetex elsewhere (/usr/local/octave-tetex/*hierarchy_here* for 
example).

Neither of these are brilliant solutions, and the latter would actually 
require hacking the cygwin package in order for it to install there, and 
still work (it would probably require tetex to be recompiled). Though 
you could perhaps persuade octave not to install the normal tetex using 
the setup database that tracks what is and isn't installed... (Not 
entirely clear on how that works at the moment though - Igor might be 
able to clear that up?)

It may be worth having an either or dependancy for octave.. tetex-bin or 
octave-tetex, the latter being the minimal set required to use 
octave-forge fully, and installing in a different path in order to 
separate it from the standard path. You'd then need to have some sort of 
wrapper that could tell octave where it was - an expansion of the basic 
script you gave would probably be sufficient - perhaps testing for it in 
/usr/bin, and if it didn't exist, appending or prepending the 
octave-tetex path. Of course, the octave-tetex would have to conflict 
with tetex-bin, and tetex-bin would have to effectively supplant it if 
it was selected, or was already installed...


None of this is all that straightforward, but it would mean people 
weren't forced to install tetex..

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