Building

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

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.

• Octave for Debian systems.
• Octave for Arch Linux.
• Building for Macintosh platform
• Building on Cygwin platform

Dependencies

Critical
Recommended
Not critical

Task	Name	Usage	License / Copyright	Version	Debian	ArchLinux	Level	Recent CVE ?
Build tools	C++, C, and Fortran compilers	Compiling the source code	GNU GPL v3.0		build-essential	gcc-fortran		none
	GNU Make	Makefile processor	GNU GPL v3.0		make	make		none
	AWK, sed, and other Unix utilities	Miscellaneous tasks	GNU GPL v3.0		awk, sed, ...	awk, sed, ...		none
	Bison	Parser generator	GNU GPL v3.0		bison	bison		none
	Flex	Lexical analyzer	The Flex project		flex	flex		none
	Autoconf	Software configuration	GNU GPL v3.0		autoconf	autoconf		none
	Automake	Makefile generator	GNU GPL v3.0		automake	automake		none
	Libtool	Dependency of automake	Free Software Foundation		libtool	libtool		none
Documentation tools	epstool	Epstool is a utility to create or extract preview images in EPS files, fix bounding boxes and convert to bitmaps.	GPL	epstool	epstool (AUR)		none
External tools	BLAS	Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine library	Free - proper attribution request		libatlas-base-dev	atlas-lapack (AUR)		none
	LAPACK	Linear Algebra Package	Free - proper attribution request		liblapack-dev	atlas-lapack (AUR)		none
	PCRE	Perl Compatible Regular Expression library	Free		libpcre3-dev	pcre		none
	GNU Readline	Command-line editing library	GNU GPL v3.0		libreadline-dev	readline		none
	ARPACK	Solution of large-scale eigenvalue problems	BSD like - various authors		libarpack2-dev	arpack		none
	cURL	Library for transferring data with URL syntax	Free Software -- main author	> 7.32.00	curl	curl		CVE-2013-4545
	FFTW3	Library for computing discrete Fourier transforms	MIT -- GNU GPL v2.0		libfftw3-dev	fftw		none
	FLTK	Portable GUI toolkit	GNU GPL v2.0 with static linking exception		libfltk1.3-dev	fltk		none
	fontconfig	Library for configuring and customizing font access	Provided "as is" -- various authors		fontconfig	fontconfig		none
	FreeType	Portable font engine	compatible with GNU GPL v3.0		libfreetype6-dev	freetype2		none
	GLPK	GNU Linear Programming Kit	GNU GPL v3.0		libglpk-dev	glpk		none
	gnuplot	Interactive graphics program	Provided "as is" -- various authors		gnuplot	gnuplot		none
	GraphicsMagick++	Image processing library	various -- integrates many third-party libs	> 1.3.18	libgraphicsmagick++1-dev	graphicsmagick		CVE-2013-4589
	HDF5	Library for manipulating portable data files	BSD - like		libhdf5-dev	hdf5		none
	OpenGL	API for portable 2D and 3D graphics	Free specs -- license is driver dependent		libgl-dev	mesa-libgl		none
	Qhull	Computational geometry library	Free software -- specific		libqhull-dev	qhull		none
	QRUPDATE	QR factorization updating library	GNU GPL v3.0		libqrupdate-dev	qrupdate (AUR)		none
	SuiteSparse	Sparse matrix factorization library	Main author		libsuitesparse-dev	suitesparse		none
	zlib	Data compression library	Provided "as is" -- various authors		zlib1g-dev	zlib		none

Security concerns

• CVE-2013-4545 (cURL): solved by version 7.34.00. Upgrade dependencies.
• CVE-2013-4589 (graphicsmagick): the actual version (1.3.18, released March 9th, 2013), is affected. Awaiting a new release.