Building

Revision as of 07:26, 25 October 2019 by Siko1056 (talk | contribs) (→‎See also: Add README)

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

General steps

Build from the development repository Build from a release
Install all build dependencies (see below).
hg clone https://www.octave.org/hg/octave && \
cd octave                                  && \
./bootstrap
wget https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/octave/octave-9.1.0.tar.gz && \
tar -xzf octave-9.1.0.tar.gz
mkdir .build                            && \
cd    .build                            && \
./../configure --prefix=$HOME/my_octave && \ [1]
make -j2                                && \ [2]
make check                              && \
make install

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

Dependencies marked with green background are required for building Octave. All other tools and libraries are recommended/optional, but very useful features (like the GUI, plotting, etc.) are likely to be disabled.

Build tools

Dependency Description License / Copyright
Autoconf Software configuration GNU GPL v3.0
Automake Makefile generator GNU GPL v3.0
C++, C, and Fortran compilers Compiling the source code GNU GPL v3.0
GNU Make Makefile processor GNU GPL v3.0
Libtool Dependency of automake Free Software Foundation
Unix utilities: gawk, gperf, less, ncurses Miscellaneous tasks GNU GPL v3.0
Bison Parser generator GNU GPL v3.0
Flex Lexical analyzer The Flex project

Documentation tools

Dependency Description License / Copyright
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
FTGL Portable font engine to perform font rendering for Octave’s OpenGL-based graphics functions. GNU GPL v2.0
GL2PS GL2PS is a C library providing high quality vector output for any OpenGL application. GNU LGPL v2.0
Texi2HTML Perl script which converts Texinfo source files to HTML output. GNU GPL v3.0
Texinfo Documentation system that uses a single source to produce both on-line information and printed output. GNU GPL v3.0
TeX Live TeX document production system including all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software. Freely redistributable as defined by the Free Software Foundation
transfig Tans­lates fig­ures gen­er­ated by xfig to a large va­ri­ety of for­mats. BSD Style Li­cense

External tools and libraries

Dependency Description License / Copyright
BLAS Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine library Free - proper attribution request
LAPACK Linear Algebra Package Free - proper attribution request
PCRE Perl Compatible Regular Expression library Free
GNU Readline Command-line editing library GNU GPL v3.0
ARPACK Solution of large-scale eigenvalue problems BSD like - various authors
cURL Library for transferring data with URL syntax Free Software -- main author
FFTW3 Library for computing discrete Fourier transforms MIT -- GNU GPL v2.0
FLTK Portable GUI toolkit GNU GPL v2.0 with static linking exception
fontconfig Library for configuring and customizing font access Provided "as is" -- various authors
FreeType Portable font engine compatible with GNU GPL v3.0
GLPK GNU Linear Programming Kit GNU GPL v3.0
gnuplot Interactive graphics program Provided "as is" -- various authors
GraphicsMagick++ Image processing library various -- integrates many third-party libs
HDF5 Library for manipulating portable data files BSD - like
OpenGL API for portable 2D and 3D graphics Free specs -- license is driver dependent
Qhull Computational geometry library Free software -- specific
QRUPDATE QR factorization updating library GNU GPL v3.0
SuiteSparse Sparse matrix factorization library Main author
zlib Data compression library Provided "as is" -- various authors

See also

Footnotes

  1. --prefix determines the installation location.
  2. Depending on your system and processor count, use a larger number of parallel jobs, e.g. -j8.