Octaviz, VTK, & Octave CMAKE???

[Bill McGonigle]

On Aug 6, 2008, at 15:46, Labitt, Bruce wrote:

> I am getting a cmake configuration error.  Before I ask the  
> question, I
> need to know what the following two dots means in the expression:
>
> VTK_DIR   :  /usr/local/bin/../lib/vtk-5.0

'..' means 'up one level' or 'parent directory'.  So that's an obtuse  
way to write:

   /usr/local/lib/vtk-5.0

Probably some autodetection thing is generating that.

> 	VTK_DIR: The directory containing VTKConfig.cmake.  This is
> either the root of the build 	tree, or PREFIX/lib/vtk for an
> installation.

Note, /usr/local isn't where most RPM's will install stuff - it's  
probably finding a previous build you did.  If you have the RPM build  
from upstream installed successfully, make sure you clean out what  
you did previously since that one wound up borken.

> What a colossal pain this is.

Yeah, it surprised me this wasn't built in to Scientific Linux.   
Octave and VTK are built in to Fedora 9, but I'm assuming you're  
running Scientific Linux for other reasons.

Software can sometimes be a pain to build, especially on new  
architectures (x86_64 is still a young architecture for Linux apps as  
many developers don't have the hardware yet) and unusual build  
systems.  For a point of comparison, many of us were using Linux  
before RPM, dpkg, or ebuilds came along.  Then it used to be you had  
to hunt through FTP site listings to find software.  Then RedHat came  
along, then rpmfind.net, then apt-get and yum.  Now it's *easy!* :)    
I ported POVRay to Alpha as its first 64-bit platform and it took me  
half a semester in college. :(

> Sorry to vent.  Anyone got some helpful suggestions?

Yes!  When you get it working send your .spec files upstream to a  
repo so the next poor guy can type 'yum -y install octaviz'!  The  
reality is somebody has probably done all this work before (several  
times, no doubt) and failed to share.  Learn from their asocial  
behaviors and your misery, and remember every time you type 'yum -y  
install foo' and it says '72MB of packages to download and install',  
somebody else did this kind of thing and shared to make it that easy.

-Bill
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