Building

General information about building the Octave source for different operating systems.

• Linux
  • Arch Linux
  • Debian (and Debian-based)
  • RedHat (and RedHat-based)
  • Slackware
• macOS
• Windows
  • Building on Cygwin platform
  • MXE cross compiler

We try to keep build instructions up to date in the source tree. Please clone using Mercurial or download it to see the README.

There are also instructions in the manual.

Dependencies

Critical
Recommended
Not critical

Task	Dependency	Description	License / Copyright	Version	Level	Recent CVE ?
Build tools	C++, C, and Fortran compilers	Compiling the source code	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	GNU Make	Makefile processor	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	Unix utilities: gawk, gperf, less, ncurses	Miscellaneous tasks	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	Bison	Parser generator	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	Flex	Lexical analyzer	The Flex project			none
	Autoconf	Software configuration	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	Automake	Makefile generator	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	Libtool	Dependency of automake	Free Software Foundation			none
Documentation tools	epstool	Epstool is a utility to create or extract preview images in EPS files, fix bounding boxes and convert to bitmaps.	GNU GPL v2.0			none
	FTGL	FTGL is a free cross-platform Open Source C++ library that uses Freetype2 to simplify rendering fonts in OpenGL applications.	Provided "as is" -- various authors			none
	GL2PS	GL2PS is a C library providing high quality vector output for any OpenGL application.	GNU LGPL v2.0			none
	pstoedit	Translates PostScript and PDF graphics into other vector formats.	GNU GPL v2.0			none
	Texi2HTML	Perl script which converts Texinfo source files to HTML output.	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	Texinfo	Documentation system that uses a single source to produce both on-line information and printed output.	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	TeX Live generic	Mixed bag of generic macro packages and fonts.	Freely redistributable as defined by the Free Software Foundation			none
	TeX Live	Compiler for TeX doumentation.	Freely redistributable as defined by the Free Software Foundation			none
	transfig	Tans­lates fig­ures gen­er­ated by xfig to a large va­ri­ety of for­mats.	BSD Style Li­cense			none
External tools	BLAS	Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine library	Free - proper attribution request			none
	LAPACK	Linear Algebra Package	Free - proper attribution request			none
	PCRE	Perl Compatible Regular Expression library	Free			none
	GNU Readline	Command-line editing library	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	ARPACK	Solution of large-scale eigenvalue problems	BSD like - various authors			none
	cURL	Library for transferring data with URL syntax	Free Software -- main author	> 7.32.00		CVE-2013-4545
	FFTW3	Library for computing discrete Fourier transforms	MIT -- GNU GPL v2.0			none
	FLTK	Portable GUI toolkit	GNU GPL v2.0 with static linking exception			none
	fontconfig	Library for configuring and customizing font access	Provided "as is" -- various authors			none
	FreeType	Portable font engine	compatible with GNU GPL v3.0			none
	GLPK	GNU Linear Programming Kit	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	gnuplot	Interactive graphics program	Provided "as is" -- various authors			none
	GraphicsMagick++	Image processing library	various -- integrates many third-party libs	> 1.3.18		CVE-2013-4589
	HDF5	Library for manipulating portable data files	BSD - like			none
	OpenGL	API for portable 2D and 3D graphics	Free specs -- license is driver dependent			none
	Qhull	Computational geometry library	Free software -- specific			none
	QRUPDATE	QR factorization updating library	GNU GPL v3.0			none
	SuiteSparse	Sparse matrix factorization library	Main author			none
	zlib	Data compression library	Provided "as is" -- various authors			none

Security concerns

• CVE-2013-4545 (cURL): not sensitive if not compiled against OpenSSH. Solved by version 7.34.00. Upgrade dependencies if required.
• CVE-2013-4589 (graphicsmagick): the actual version (1.3.18, released March 9th, 2013), is affected. Awaiting a new release.